I'm Reviewing the Situation

I've been on an extended road trip for the past ten days or so, checking in from time to time with the traveling blog, so to speak. But I'm back in the saddle, i.e., ergonomic chair, and hope to get caught up shortly. 

I did see one happy announcement the other day. In the face of The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers cutting back on book reviews recently, along comes an announcement that the New Orleans Times-Picayune will introduce a NEW book coverage section, "The Reading Life," on January 11.  "Our expanded books coverage is built on a belief that a great many of our readers have a rich and varied reading life, beyond the newspaper," the editors said in the newspaper on Dec. 30. "And while some national statistics seem to suggest that reading is on the decline, others make a different case."

Still, the overall scope of newspaper book reviews continues to shrink. The National Book Critics Circle launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing earlier this year, with ideas on how you can get involved to make sure owners and editors know that book sections matter. Of course, the National Book Critics have a vested interest in having the print reviews continue, but Lindsay Waters, executive editor of the humanities at the Harvard University Press, nonetheless made some interesting points in a panel hosted by the NBCC and Bookforum last July in which he said "Killing the book reviews is Chernobyl for the Life of the Mind."

Fortunately, the Web has taken up some of the slack, although it remains to be seen what the future of book reviewing will ultimately wind up resembling. I guess as long as the "Big Four" non-newspaper reviewers (Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly) are willing to take on the task, authors can hope they'll get a few crumbs of coverage and a decent blurb or two. I've got a smallish listing of review entities in The List under the Reviews section, and hope to add more soon.

But ultimately, word of mouth is probably still the best "review" process out there.