The Written Nerd

Though I fear it has been too long in coming and will be a bit underwhelming, I'd like to try to articulate my own thoughts on the nature and evolution of book reviews: mainstream media, blogs, print, internet, etc. And it turns out living read girl' s Lady T (who ought to have a paying gig as a cultural critic) got there first. To put it in a nutshell, she writes It's like public school funding, the arts are the first ones to take the hit, while the football team gets their new uniforms. It's all about money to the corporations who run the newspaper/magazine industry,not quality vs. quantity. Essentially, we (that is, bloggers and professional book reviewers, the internet and the newspaper) are not each other's enemy. I mentioned some time ago the Wall Street Journal article which observed that publishers' allocation of advertising funds -- that is, spending money to get stacks of bestsellers front and center in chain stores, rather than on advertising in book...

Okay, this is the lazy girl's version of a Wednesday post. Below you'll find your comments and those of your fellow WN readers on reviews, in semi-abbreviated form, broken up by category: book industry, authors, and general readers (though of course there is some overlap). It's a bit long, but I thought it might be useful to see how people with different relationships to books are thinking about this issue. I'll have my thoughts on the issue on Friday. From the Book Industry: As a person who works in a bookstore, I find that a lot of customers still come in looking for a book that they read about in the Times (NPR being a close second in popularity.) Often, they don't remember the title or the author, so I try and read the Times book review so I can remember the name of the book based on their plot summary. (Noelle) Hi, I work in the bookselling industry so a lot of the books that I end up reading are just books which I've stumbled across while receiving book...

In case you don't read any blogs but mine, let me first clumsily sketch the current issues raging in the blogosphere at the moment, and in the world of book culture at large. The National Book Critics Circle has launched a campaign to preserve newspaper book review sections, beginning with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which recently fired its full-time book section editor. You can read their reasons and their strategies here on the NBCC blog, Critical Mass . Some periodicals (like the New York Times ) and many bloggers, have picked up the story and interpreted it in terms of the rise of literary blogs. Some opinions (with which I risk offending someone even by summarizing): - book reviews are suffering because blogs are cheaper and easier to produce. - blogs represent contemporary, passionate criticism, while mainstream media reviews have gotten staid, elitist, boring, or irrelevant. - professional reviewers represent an educated opinion on books, while bloggers are often a...

I've got books to review, too, but I'm behind on my links, so let's try to keep up! - In big book world/blog world news, the National Book Critics Circle led by John Freeman has launched a campaign to save the newspaper book section -- specifically, to keep the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from firing its book review editor and eliminating the section. The campaign has sparked interest everywhere, including this article in the New York Times positing that reviews may be moving from mainstream print media to blogs (and everyone's got an opinion on that one). The Times article mentions a bunch of my fellow Litblog Co-Op members -- major congrats, guys! I think many folks ultimately agree that newspaper book review sections and amateur literary blogs both are (or can be) vital parts of the nation's literary culture and conversation -- it's not an either/or thing. There's something to be said both for the professional editorial "filtered" atmosph...