Critical Collective

Image: Where you’ll find me this summer on the rare occasion I’m not procrastinating.

Hello friends, and greetings from the end of another semester in the long line of endlessly marching semesters. Worms ate all of our broccoli and cauliflower plants but the curly endive is towering disturbingly and the beet greens are still holding out despite the heat. It’s that time a year where I’m being probably self-destructively optimistic about the summer. Mantra: we’ll see.

I’ve been thinking about book reviews a little more than usual recently. I put a pause on writing them and have been looking to unpause. I have a few applications/pitches out there, but I also have a lot of mixed feelings about book reviews in general. Way back in 2014, I wrote about my uneasiness about book reviews , especially when compared with video game reviews, for Full-Stop , and my thoughts haven’t changed a lot since then. A summary: there is no incentive for a reviewer to be critical of a book except for the count-on-one-hand number of people who still get to review books as their full-time job, that book reviews have completely resisted any kind of score or value assignment, and that these two factors along with others work to make Goodreads an infinitely better way to find your “next read” and relegate the majority of book reviews to nice little mini-essays on the topic of a book, but not useful as actual “reviews.”

When I wrote about this subject in 2014, I thought having more sites assign scores to books would help. I still think that’s true, but I also have a fanciful idea for another solution: a semi-anonymous book reviewing collective. Imagine an organization with a public member list that writes book reviews for publications but each review is only attributed to the organization. This would free the authors to be critical while still retaining some credit for writing. The organization would remove some of the work of the publications in terms of seeking out reliable reviewers. It’d sell exclusive and multi-use reviews.

This idea is fanciful for a bunch of reasons. Not enough people read book reviews and not enough book reviewers are paid for this to really become an option. Plus, it’d have some major consequences in terms of gatekeeping and reducing the number of voices heard. But, I don’t know, I keep coming back to the fact that as a book reviewer, if I start reading a book I’m supposed to review and absolutely hate it, then I feel like my only realistic options are to cancel my agreement to do the review (which I’ve only done once) or write a half-true review that omits the negative aspects and focuses only on the positives (which I’ve done several times). Writing a negative review will gain me nothing and possibly cost me a future relationship with the publisher, the author, or someone connected to either. So few people read these reviews that when I do find a book that I want to give a glowing review I’m pretty sure me telling people I loved the book via word-of-mouth has sold more copies than the actual reviews themselves have (looking at you, A True Novel !). Couple this with the fact that if I want to choose a new book to read I never turn to reviews but instead to a combination of social media and Goodreads (which I guess is social media too). What’s the solution? Maybe there isn’t one and instead this is just symptomatic of a difficult industry. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a dumb question to begin with — do reviews of any media really drive sales? I’m sure a few marketing gurus know, or maybe they don’t, considering how many dollars worth of review copies I get sent to my doorstep even still. These are dollars that I can’t help thinking should somehow wind their way into paying for reviews instead of being blasted out in the form of unread advanced review copies, but then paying for reviews is viewed as unethical, even though no one reads reviews, and so on and so on.

What is your relationship to reviews of any stripe? Are you the kind of person who only reads movie reviews after you’ve seen the movie? Do you think reviews serve a real purpose, or should they instead just be essays centered on a particular work of art? If you were in charge of the world, how would you set up a financially stable review ecology? I love book reviews and want to see them be more successful, but I have no idea what that looks like. Maybe it doesn’t look like convincing people to buy a book, or maybe it doesn’t look like a review at all.

Further reading:

• “Listen to Longform podcast” is my immediate response to anyone uninformed enough to ask me my opinion on becoming a writer. Pretty much every episode is great, but this recent one with Michelle Dean was especially good.
• This flawed Washington Post article about one vs. two spaces after a period caused a small, predictable uproar in my feeds. It took me about three months to unlearn doing two spaces after a period, which has been useful primarily for Twitter as well as saving me the fifteen seconds it takes to remove them for the majority of publications which prefer single spacing.
• College Republicans are the topic du jour. I haven’t listened to the TAL episode yet (and probably won’t since TAL gets dropped from my podcast rotation during the summer), but Scaachi Koul’s dive into the California College Republicans Convention at UCSB was scary/insightful/car-crash-level fascinating.
• I’m bad about finding new music, listening mostly to the same things I’ve been listening to for fifteen years and the random chillhop stations on YouTube when I’m writing. I only buy 2–3 albums per year. This year my second album purchase was Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae, and yeah, get on that.

I hope all is well in your slice of the world. Tomorrow I head into a classroom for the last time until September where I will stare into my students’ faces and wonder about what path they take from here, and then I try to figure out what summer should look like. A standing desk, baking bread, a lot of popcorn, and more stretching.

-g