Book Reviews

OK....maybe it's just me. But every since I started blogging about books, I've noticed a lot of animosity over the so-called book review. With the announcement last week of the Man Booker Prize winner, Sir Howard Davies, the director of the London School of Economics AND the chairman of the Man Booker Prize selection committee, blasted Book Reviewers. (at least this time, book bloggers were NOT fired upon. Maybe he thinks we are too inconsequential!)

In this article found at The Bookseller.com, Davies pretty much launched an attack of all professional book reviewers, and novelists in particular. He said, "I think a little more distance, and critical scepticism, is required by our reviewers, together with greater readiness to notice new names." He stopped short of accusing authors of back-scratching, though he said he was well aware that such practices went on, and he called for "more diversity in the sort of people who review novels".

I have myself wondered sometimes about author reviews of books. I think it would be hard to give an unbiased review for a book that was written by someone you know. Even so, that is hardly a reason to give a blanket statement saying that all author reviews are biased. For example, Stephen King(who you all know is my very favorite author) writes for EW, and I LOVE to get his take on books. I figure, if Uncle Steve like them and I like Uncle Steve, then I'll probably like the books.

The Bookseller article did print a response by Erika Wagner, literary editor of The Times. She was trying to defend her occupation by saying, "It is very difficult, I have found over the years, to offer any coherent defence of how and why novels are reviewed. What a strange business! Novels, I believe, exist to move the reader, to change the way a reader looks at the world; the trouble is, and ever was, that every reader (and so, every reviewer and literary editor) is different." There. Isn't that really the heart of it all? Every reader is different. No matter how hard you try, not every person is going to agree with you. Not everyone is going to like the books I read. I don't expect them to.

I think this is why I rely so heavily on reviews by book bloggers. In this strange little "world" we occupy, I feel like I have gotten to know a lot of you a little more personally than I know the book reviewers for the New York Times. In that sense, I feel like I can trust your reviews. And if I in turn disagree, I certainly have that right, just as all you have the right to disagree with me. People are different....it would be a very boring world if we were all the same.

I do realize all of this was prompted by this year's Man Booker Prize selections. Books that most of us have never even heard of. The Gathering by Anne Enright won the coveted prize. It is described as "Exileratingly Bleak". Maybe it's just me again. But when I read, I'm trying to escape and enjoy myself. Do I really want to read something bleak?? Probably not. I want to be entertained. That is the main reason I read. I have to be in the mood to enjoy something that is going to be hard to process. If one of my book-blogging friends recommend it, then I may indeed pick up The Gathering one day.