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I’m doing a Star Trek comic!

I’m really sad about the slow death of book criticism

A few weeks ago, I found out on social media that I had lost my job as science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. I've been meaning to write about it for my newsletter ever since, but I needed time¹ to collect my thoughts — and I didn't just want to rehash what everyone else was already saying.

I really loved that gig, and I'm still feeling kinda bereft. I've written before about how invigorating it was to be paid to keep tabs on everything being published in science fiction and fantasy, and to read a decent selection of the new books coming out every month. I felt like a part of the SFF community in a whole different way. Plus that gig forced me to spend a lot of time reading cool stories instead of looking at upsetting news online. Being able to shout out amazing new books by lesser known authors felt like a way to give back and to help keep genre fiction healthy and exciting. 

As someone pointed out to me on Blue sky, this is the second time I've lost a dream job thanks to a billionaire².

It's also terribly sad to see the Washington Post gutting its Metro section and its international coverage. I lived in D.C. for a brief moment in my early twenties, and I got a print subscription to the Post because that felt like a thing grown-ups did. I remember the feeling of learning something about the world from reading great journalism. This was one of the all-time great newspapers and I always thought of it as the gold standard. Seeing the Post gutted makes me feel gutted.

I’d been so proud to start writing for the Post, several years ago. Originally I was writing for the opinion section, and I was briefly being groomed to have a regular op-ed column — but being a pundit wasn’t as fun as I’d always dreamed it would be, for various reasons. Still, I'm immensely proud of this op-ed about trans kids, which felt like a big deal to get printed in a national newspaper even back then.

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I'm trying to hold on to the habit of reading constantly, because it's so freaking good for my mental health. But I don't know how, or if, I'm going to keep writing book criticism. It's a ton of work, especially when you're not getting paid or having a real chance to influence the conversation outside of your own bubble.

A few other things happened around the same time I lost my gig. There was a new wave of drummed-up excitement about the notion of A.I.-written novels as a path to financial success. A lot of journalistic institutions started trying to integrate themselves with online betting — excuse me, prediction markets — which felt like another nail in the coffin of journalistic integrity. I've been seeing more and more of those scam emails that promise to help promote my book on Goodreads or in some non-existent book club, because there's just noplace else to get attention for your book anymore.

More than ever, I am determined to support indie journalism, including startup publications like Flaming Hydra, Coyote Media, Garbage Day, Forever Wars, 48 Hills, 404 Media and a ton of others. We need good indie journalism more than ever right now, which is why the forces of enshittification are so determined to starve it of resources. 

But I also think we need to find more ways to support book criticism as an art form and as a conversation starter. I would love to see more indie book publications like Maris Kreizman’s The Maris Review or Andrew Liptak’s Transfer Orbit. But I also think book journalism often works best as a side dish for other sorts of writing — the same way people used to come to the Post for news or sports, but might have stuck around to read my book reviews. It's sometimes better if book criticism is part of a larger venture. 

It's freakishly hard to get people to read book criticism, and this has been a problem for a very long time. So while I was at the Post, I spent a lot of time working with my editors trying to craft headlines and formats that’d help my column get more eyeballs without compromising the substance of the column itself. My guess is that book criticism is one of those things that people enjoy reading, but they won't seek it out. If they stumble across it, and it seems to be speaking to real things that are happening in politics and culture at large, people will devour it. 

I've written before about the role of a book critic, and how important I think it is for this to be a profession in addition to being something that people do for fun at Goodreads or other platforms. This is partly because when I was writing for the Post, I would try to meet books on their own terms, rather than judging them according to what I would’ve wished them to be. There's absolutely nothing wrong with reviewing a book on the basis of "I wanted more X, and this book gave me Y instead," which is what I often see in user-generated reviews. That's reviewing a book as a consumer rather than a critic: You bought a product, you wanted it to do a certain thing, and it did or did not do that thing. (For more of my thoughts on Goodreads, see here.)

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Part of the job of a book critic is making critical judgments — because I only had 200 words per book, or sometimes fewer if I was reviewing more books, I mostly reviewed books for the Post which I’d either loved or enjoyed with some reservations. If I'd had more space, or had been reviewing a single book at a greater length, I might have written more harsh reviews. But even in that short space with limited ability to get into the weeds, I still tried my best to offer thoughts about how the book was using narrative devices, and how well they worked. 

Another key role of a book critic, however, is curation. In my case, I was allowed to choose which books I reviewed out of tons of options every month³. At other publications, an editor might assign one or several books for review. Either way, a person is making a judgment about which books are worth paying attention to — which books seem important, relevant, or exceptional. 

Curation is one of those things that can only be done by a human, and it's a skill you develop over time. I have curated spoken word events, anthologies, book-review columns, news coverage, and tons of other stuff. And the more I've done that work, the more it's become clear to me that a lot of the work of making value judgments happens before you begin to review a text or feature an artist. Curation is how we shape culture — it's how we decide what is worth chattering about right now — which is much more important than fusty old canon. (Canon is about reshuffling fragments of the past. Leave it to the dead, honestly.) 

In the book world, there are many points of curation. Editors and publishing professionals decide which books a particular publisher will put out. Booksellers decide how many copies of a book to order, and which books to place on the display tables with their covers visible to consumers. Voters or juries decide which books to give awards to. Maybe I'm puffing myself up here, but I always felt as though criticism was an important link in the chain of curation, partly because I didn't have to worry about picking books that would be commercially successful or which could win over a critical mass of award voters. I often went out of my way, in fact, to pick weird and challenging books from small presses and marginalized authors. 

Pausing here to say that I’ve never claimed my curatorial judgment was infallible or more important than anyone else’s. I’ve got my own biases and obsessions, and there are things that other people love which annoy me — and vice versa. This is really why we need a lot of experienced, thoughtful people doing curation, so you don’t get one person in a position to make these judgments for everyone.

The enemy of curation is algorithms. In many areas of our lives, we are now being force-fed content by unthinking, unreflecting mechanical systems. Pink slime machines. I've been nervous about algorithms gaining a bigger foothold in the world of books for quite some time, especially since the rise of algorithmic social media like Booktok. The notion of making a living with A.I.-generated books appears to be predicated on the belief that algorithms will be serving up book slop the same way we are force-fed other kinds of slop.

One thing I have seen over the past three-and-a-half years of book reviews is that there are always more amazing books being published then I could ever have had space to write about. I found plenty of underwhelming books, to be sure, but I was always spoiled for choice when it came to selecting a handful of books for each monthly column. The books I either liked or loved ranged from tiny experimental publications to fancy literary works to extremely thoughtful and well-executed versions of popular trends like romantasy, cozy fiction, dark academia, etc. That was one of the things that gave me hope, in fact: a lot of what was popular in the book world was also bloody good.

I worked in Hollywood a bit before the WGA strike, and two things soon became apparent to me. If I wanted to have a career as a TV writer, I was going to spend most of my time working on IP: sequels, remakes, reimaginings of old properties. And meanwhile, Hollywood seemed desperate for new IP to mine, including recent books. Producers who optioned my works seemed keen to be as faithful as possible to my vision, even when it seemed like they'd be better off making it their own. I came away with the impression that if I wanted to ever create something brand new that got made in Hollywood, I'd be way better off writing it in book form and getting someone to option it and develop it. It’s genuinely weird: there are so many brilliant writers in Hollywood, who have tons of original ideas, but they’re stuck working on adaptations of my silly books as well as many other recent books.

Hollywood's descent into endless repetition and churn of old ideas feels like a microcosm of what's happening to culture in general as algorithms take over. And the book world, more than ever, is where new shit emerges from. So the task of discovering incredible books that nobody's talking about yet, and shouting about them, is more important than ever. As I wrote before, that's something we can all be doing to the best of our ability, but I think there's some value in it being a job. I hope the job of “book critic” never goes away entirely, or we’ll all be in trouble — even people who don’t give a shit about books.

Music I Love Right Now

The other night I was feeling a certain way about the state of the world, so I turned to the Ladies of Soul. I have written about the Ladies of Soul before: they are four or five Dutch women, including Candy Dulfer, who do an annual show at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam where they cover soul hits. They absolutely commit to being a slightly cheesy cover band and bring a ton of energy and positivity to it. But their arrangements are actually razor-sharp, and their band is a collection of top-notch musicians who’ve played with folks like Prince. Anyway, if you need cheering up, here’s a half-hour medley they did in 2015, featuring a cameo from Sheila E:

How would you describe those outfits? Punky glam? Fetish camp?