Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
I'm with Harry on this one with some exception. I do rely on reviews in the New York Review of Books (and in the past on the London Review of Books) and a couple of other sources -- but not the New York Times Book Review, whose reviews are much too superficial to be of value these days -- because these review avenues, over many years, have earned my trust. Under no circumstance do I buy or not buy a book based on "reader" reviews at, for example, Smashwords (unless I happen to know the reviewer) or Amazon.
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Anis Shivani actually has an article today completely trashing the New York Times Book Review. I have never read the review, but I find Shivani's writing vigorous and entertaining. It is called "The Death of the New York Times Book Review: And Why That Is a Very Good Thing for Books."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-s..._b_840371.html
He makes four general points.
1. Limited Range of Books: "An enormous range of innovative fiction and poetry issues forth from the nation's vibrant independent presses, yet the Times studiously ignores these books in favor of the few hyped-up books from the major commercial houses centered in New York. The South, the Southwest, the West, and to a certain extent the Midwest, might as well be foreign lands, despite their literary productivity."
"The same applies to nonfiction. The university presses produce the overwhelming majority of worthwhile books in the social sciences, humanities, arts, and sciences, yet they are almost completely unrepresented in the Times's review pages. The major houses tend to ride the trends, promoting conventional wisdom rather than challenging it..."
2. Limited Range of Opinions: "Anything radical--meaning, anything that goes against the peculiarly subdued elite New York liberalism, any radicalism of the left or the right, any questioning of the basic rightness of institutions--is treated with derision by the reviewer.
The book review becomes, in effect, a mechanism to screen out incorrect political opinion. This is one reason innovative fiction and poetry finds no place in the Times's review pages: by definition the territory beyond domestic realism is where the institutions of society are being bombarded, by radical and anarchic and individualistic forces--namely, out-of-control writers."
3. Limited Range of Reviewers: "This is a perennial difficulty in book reviewing, yet the Times has turned it into a subtle system of patronage and servitude, a carrot and stick approach that perpetuates an incestuous system of backslapping and mutual admiration, rather than any independent judgment of the quality of books under review."
4. Limited Range of Tone/Style/Language/Attitude: "Almost any review in the Times's pages will prove this point. The reviews lack any individual voice, any eccentricity of tone and attitude--all in keeping with the general bland liberalism. Ideally, reviews should excite the imagination, create a stir about the book in question, whether it's a good book or a bad one--the reviewer should have an opinion, first of all, if the review is to mean anything, but then the opinion must be expressed in memorable language. The review is a place for playfulness, fun, exploration, speculation, sarcasm, anger, rage, frustration, prejudice, mockery, hubris, restlessness, nihilism, adoration, sickness, joy, love, indeed any familiar human emotion."
"The formula is this: Say a few harmless (often downright irrelevant) words about the writer, his previous books or his recent successes, say some meaningless things about what a book in the given genre means (reiterating the point of view of the reviewing committee at the Times), then launch into an extended précis of the plot or narrative, with the subtext that, now that the reviewer has adequately summarized the book, the reader need not tackle it at all, and end with a few bland comments about the posture of the review just concluded."
"The format all but forces smart people to say stupid things."
"Commercial interests conveniently merge with political bias to create a propagated landscape of erosion and waste, hiding the real vibrancy of books in America. The books that end up in the Times's Top 100 or Top 10 every year are simply the ones with the most advertising muscle and public relations hype behind them."
"To take another example of constriction, poetry has been almost entirely eliminated from the Times's pages, setting a terrible precedent--except in capsule roundups that betray the reviewer's pettiness, or the occasional snark attack by one particular critic who seems to love his enemies as much as he hates them; it's an inside game, after all, and no wider audience for poetry is solicited by these acts of willful masochism.
The rare poetry coverage belongs only to mainstream stars..."
"Instead of cosmopolitanism in taste, what we have is a dastardly parochialism, all the worse for its aura of invincibility. The New Yorker suffers from the same consistently middlebrow tendency, favoring the lightweight and superficial, and in both cases the affliction is aggravated by its presumption of elite taste..."
He does conclude on somewhat of a positive note:
"The bright spot on the horizon is that the future of book reviewing, in the age of the Internet, will be nothing like what the Times has propagated over the years: reviewing in the imminent future should be more open-ended, interactive, democratic, transparent, authoritative, credible, opinionated, stylish, argumentative, deep, and controversial, or at least more so than the Times has ever shown any inclination to be. In the last ten years, as the Internet came of age, the Times, rather than becoming open to the possibilities of the medium, seemed to double down on its lackluster prose, pushing a top-down image of the reviewer dispensing frictionless wisdom (a podcast by itself doesn't create excitement, if the general rule about discouraging readers from exploring unfamiliar material remains in effect, and if the bland tone of the printed text carries over to audio and video). "
I think it is worth a read.