| Newspaper Book Reviews: An Endangered Species? | |||||
|
|||||
|
How do you choose books to read? Perhaps you depend on friends or family members with similar tastes in reading, or on best-seller lists, or maybe you just pick up any book with an interesting cover. Maybe you have a standing order for any new books by your favorite contemporary authors. There’s nothing wrong with any of these methods, but what about reading newspaper book reviews? They have often been my personal source of book information, so I was interested in the news that they are becoming an endangered species. According to the National Book Critics Circle, “Over the past five years, one by one, newspapers have begun to forsake books and their readers.” Dozens of well-known big-city newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Atlanta Journal, among others, have cut back or discontinued their book coverage. Says the Critics Circle, “We’re tired of watching individual voices from local communities passed over for wire copy. We’re tired of book editors with decades of experience being shown the exit.” Of course the professional critics are interested in preserving their jobs, but is there more to this? Do you care? In this column and one or two later ones, I intend to examine the situation, and I invite you to comment here or in the Writers Forum. What does this have to do with writing? Being a writer involves being a reader as well, and even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, have you considered writing book reviews yourself to share here on eGenerations and elsewhere on line? I’ll tell you how in a later column. Remember those movies, often musicals, in which the struggling theater company opened its new play, probably in New York, and then eagerly awaited the early edition newspaper reviews? The critics could make or break the show with a comment or two. Perhaps a star was born. Somehow, in my naive Midwestern way, I once assumed that book publishing was like that: send a copy to each “name” newspaper reviewer or book section editor and wait for the review. I don’t know whether or not that was ever the reality, but it certainly isn’t now. Book reviews seem to have moved to the Internet (more on that in my next column). But aren’t newspaper reviews worth saving? To me, and perhaps to other seniors who are more isolated and still readers of newspapers, those print reviews offer a sort of lifeline to books we might otherwise not encounter. Here’s more from the Book Critics Circle: Author Steve Weinberg learned from Chicago Sun Times book section editor Teresa Budasi that the book section would be reduced “in size and scope” in 2008. Weinberg writes, “What a shame, because the ‘big section’ contained so much wonderful material every Sunday.” He goes on to describe the contents of the December 23 Sunday edition of the Sun Times: It contained short reviewers’ accounts of the best books they’d read during 2007, a question-and-answer column with an author, a feature about holiday books for children, a do-it-yourself column about self-publishing, and a story about a book-related game. It also contained Editor Budasi’s column about the downsizing, entitled, “How the Grinch Stole the Books Section.” Of course newspaper readership and the related advertising revenue are said to be down. You can blame TV or the Internet or the “dumbing down of society”; I have no special expertise in this matter (I never worked for a newspaper after college, although I’d have liked to). Reading in general is said to be down, too, although I’ve never seen convincing evidence of that. I happen to believe that print book reviews and newspaper book sections deserve to be saved. The Critics recommend the following: Start or sign a petition. Write to your local paper. Join the Book Critics Circle if you’re a published reviewer. However, the recommendation I like best, because we can all do it, is this one: “Engage in literary discussion–even if it means just writing in a blog, or joining a book club, or going to your local library for a discussion of a book: the more we talk about books, the better chance we have at defining our own cultural values, rather than having them defined for us.” Since I believe in fairness, here is a dissenting, negative opinion from Gerard Jones: “Book reviews are advertising. Book reviewers are shills for the marketing departments of big publishers. . . . So-called writers aspire to get themselves on bestseller lists. ‘Good’ reviews and awards by the stooges of sales guys get them there. . . . Books are commercial commodities, the same as Corn Flakes. With pretty packaging and plenty of hype, any piece of junk can become a work of lasting literature . . . for a month or two. . . . As long as books are nothing but yet another means to make money, book reviewers aren’t going to be anything but advertisers and low paid publicists and nothing worth reading, writing or reviewing is gonna get read, written or reviewed.” In one of my favorite books, Ray Bradbury’s satirical Fahrenheit 451, the firemen’s job is to burn down houses that contain books, including the books’ owner if he or she won’t leave. Captain Beatty tries to convince one book owner to get out before the fire: “None of these books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!” The book owner declines, and is incinerated along with her books. As fireman Guy Montag begins to question his job, he says to his wife Millie, “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” Airhead Millie’s answer is, “She was simple-minded.” What do you think? Are books commodities like Corn Flakes? Are newspaper book reviews worth saving? Are writing and reading worth saving–and worth doing? Writing suggestions: 1. What does reading mean to you? Links: http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=saveBookReviews |
