I hear you lost your reviewing gig.

I did! I genuinely enjoyed reviewing books for The Washington Post and I’ll miss that opportunity, but the people I feel really bad about are the staffers and regular writers. Nora Krug and Becky Meloan, the editing staff with whom I primarily worked, were smart and dedicated and seemingly tireless and I always had the sense that they truly loved what they did. They (and everyone else there) deserved a helluva lot better than this sudden, ignominious end to their work.

Are you going to keep reviewing?

I think book reviewing is a pretty noble craft, and I’ve always held the practice in high esteem. I consider myself both a writer and academic, and W. Post’s Book World (along with the LA Times and New York Times book sections, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Independent Review of Books) have done an invaluable service for literature.

I used to read Book World when it was printed in tabloid form, and I’d read every review, from Jonathon Yardley’s grumpy takedowns to Maria Arana’s insight to Michael Dirda’s playfulness, to the lofty writers who would be invited to contribute, and I genuinely never imagined my writing would appear next to theirs. “E.A. Aymar was a frequent contributor to Book World” will always appear in my byline.

But, to be completely honest with you, I could never write another book review and that’d be cool.

For real?

I mean, I would if I got paid a lot. Otherwise, I found that I was less interested in reviewing the merits of a specific book, and more interested in how that book reflects culture or society or literature. That’s probably the academic in me, but in the strict realm of book reviewing, I had to separate much of myself to be a fair judge of the writer’s work. The question became, “Do I think this book will be valuable to readers,” versus “Do I think this book is valuable.” I’d rather write about the latter. But the latter is based more on my subjectivity, and can do a decent book a disservice.

Okay, that sounds kind of analytical and also boring. Back to the Post. Were you pissed at Bezos? He sucks, right?

I don’t know. His fealty to Trump is pretty fucking gross, and he’s certainly taken steps to destroy the Post’s independence in service of of the administration, but I don’t get the sense that destroying Book World (or sports, for that matter) were part of that vision.

For one thing, I don’t know how many readers those sections were drawing. When I want sports information, I turn to ESPN or Defector or other sites, not a newspaper. Maybe readers weren’t invested in the sports page, with so many other options out there.

(On a side note, I also get the sense from sportswriters, particularly but not exclusively with the Post, that writing is just a ticket for television or, ugh, branding, and most sports “journalists” don’t give a shit about the craft beyond using it to propel them in front of a camera. They write a lot less than they talk.)

And when it comes to book reviews, I think more readers look to Goodreads or TikTok or Amazon - I don’t, but that’s apparently the trend among readers (and those are the sites where every author I know directs readers). That’s not to say coverage in a national newspaper isn’t valuable, but it may no longer be essential. That speaks to nothing of the quality of the reviews, and more to the changes in industry, and the way that traditional media has been systematically, callously cannibalized by different elements of the internet.

But Bezos could have easily funded the Post instead of making a movie about Eva Braun!

That was actually Melania Trump, but that speaks more to the sense that, just maybe, we shouldn’t trust our public goods to the mid-life crises of bored billionaires. That’s less of a problem tied to Bezos, and more of an issue with America’s power structure.

What we’ve seen, particularly in the past year, is how dependent we are on the powerful and, equally, how they are often unfit for stewardship. It’s probably necessary to adapt traditional media, as the NYT has shown, but it wasn’t a challenge the ownership of the Post capably met, particularly with an owner who considered it a side business. This wasn’t about saving the Post as much as it was moving it, relatively intact, into a new era of traditional media.

There’s also the question of how we should regard our media, whether its best positioned as a for-profit business or a public service. But regardless of which approach you take, we are hard-learning that a billionaire who is very good at one thing is absolutely not good at everything. And, to that end, they shouldn’t have power or influence over important things, simply because they can afford it.

Don’t get all socialist on me. Just tell me, is this a death knell for book reviews in traditional media?

As disappointing as it is to see Book World disappear, I don’t think it’s necessarily a death knell for either book reviews or traditional media…but it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw less of both. Newspapers may adopt the magazine approach, where the reviews don’t comprise an entire section, but rather a single review or two are featured. Which means less jobs in those papers for reviewers, and less coverage of books in those outlets.

The good news - for literature, in general - is that there are other avenues. BookTok is a thing, GoodReads is an active platform, people are still talking about books. And as long as people are talking about books, hopefully, we’ll find new places for people to write about them.

A chapter closes, the story continues.

EA

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I’ll be interviewing David Swinson about his newest novel, From the Dust, at One More Page Books, on April 2nd at 7 pm. David is a former undercover DC police officer who wrote the acclaimed Frank Marr books and he has SEEN SOME SHIT, so this will be a fun interview! I plan to bring up all sorts of trauma. RSVP here.

It's giveaway time! The winner of a copy of David Swinson’s From the Dust (upon publication) is:

giulia.________@gmail.com

Congrats, and I'll send you an email soon!

Speaking of book outlets, I used to work for C-SPAN in my day job, and a year or so ago they launched a new show called America’s Book Club featuring authors across a whole range of genres. It’s a great series and C-SPAN has always maintained a devotion to both traditional media and books. Check it out, they do good work.

And I should mention that Ron Charles, the former head reviewer for the Post, is continuing his weekly books newsletter, and it’s one of my favorite newsletters and a necessary read for fans of reading and writing. You can subscribe here.