I recently visited two places which these days (in our world of stay-at-home internet accessibility) are feeling the pressure to be innovative in order to remain competitive: the library and the movie theatre. The roomy, dine-in AMC theatre was a welcome improvement from its cramped predecessor, but the college library I visited, where I still had to press my hip into a turnstile to enter, was as familiar as it had been when I used to spend hours there a decade + ago. For once I saw some benefit in the slow-moving world that is many an educational institution. There in the library I dwelt in the cramped archaic spaces just as happily as I’d welcomed the chance to stretch out my legs in the theatre without feeling the need to become acquainted with the person sitting in front of me. I know. I’m old, cranky, and nostalgic, but I’m comfortable with that.
***
As a college student, if I wanted to know more about a book than I’d read and understood, I always went to the college library’s huge index, where one could find a book’s history of reception, the majority of which were “scholarly” reviews in books and literary journals, with the occasional “lighter” periodical (newspaper or popular magazine) review thrown in for good measure. As a beginning college student, I was never confident in my understanding of a book. I always felt for sure it was limited to my own personal reactions. My lack of knowledge of literary theory (I felt) was always certain to result in a useless narrow view of any book I read. So I would sort through a book’s reviews, being careful to avoid the completely negative ones and the completely positive ones (those, I was warned, were too personal...too biased), to find the objective, passionless ones that were the ideal approach to assessing a book.
Any appreciation for books I’d had prior to attending college was kiddie stuff. After all, I’d come into the American college system (not having gone to high school in America) unprepared for serious reading, having read books--save for Gulliver’s Travels, which I’d read as fantasy fiction, certainly not as satire--that weren’t part of any recognizable canon of great literature. In college, I quickly learned that until I could place a book in its particular genre and approach to writing, and in the world in which the author existed (agreed upon by scholars), I had nothing worthy to say of it.
Eager to be accepted and to attain much-coveted As in my courses, I studied and did what I was told, even when it resulted in cruelty to the text: Toni Cade Bambara’s “The lesson” read as cultural criticism--of American culture--yes, but to approach it as Marxist text almost completely gutted it! Nevertheless, I grew to appreciate the lessons learned from reading a book as part of a whole--whether it was a contribution to or rejection of a particular genre, period, or view of the world. But it wasn’t until I was brave enough to step outside of the teaching machine of reading and become immersed in blogging about books that I was finally able to fully admit and accept the wisdom that most people react personally to what they read, and tend not to be particularly interested in scholarly approaches to a book (even scholars).
My recent visit to the library wasn’t to do research of any kind. In fact, these days I can easily access the index of reviews online. The statement on their opening page is telling of the times:
Book Review Index Online is the database libraries have been requesting for years. We’ve taken our popular print series of the same name and made it accessible online —saving researchers valuable time and libraries valuable shelf space.
Sad and true.
These days, I approach reviewing with a mixture of my past and my present: I try to “place” or “situate” a book in relation to other books like it from more or less the same period or genre--that’s very generally speaking, I know, but that’s as much as I confess to as someone taught to read that way--and, I always give a healthy dose of my own personal reaction to it. Of course, that “personal reaction” comes loaded with many biases (as I mentioned here before), but I feel much more willing to commit to my own personal reactions than I do to scholarly approaches. It took a while getting here, but I’m happy where I am.
And yes, I have also enjoyed writing for established publications like the CRB and Caribbean Beat, where I have to be mindful of their philosophical approaches to reviewing. (Luckily for me, my biggest challenge to date has been working within a given word count.) And I also like reading the reviews in Calabash and SX Salon. Anyone who reads reviews regularly will recognize (as I do) that reviewers are not equal--some obviously know more than others and are more practiced at analysis--but I don’t necessarily believe in a hierarchy of reviews purely based on the publication in which they appear (can you spot the error in the first paragraph of this NYT review?) So I was thrilled to see my blog review of Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences alongside other scholarly ones on his Peepal Tree Press author page.
In my little cranky corner here where I continue to stretch my thoughts as far as I can, and then some more, and where I feel comfortable being in public to some degree, I’m nevertheless always conscious of the unbalanced nature of the world of books and writers, and as my readership grows, I am becoming less willing to completely slam a book written by a Caribbean writer. But I intend to continue to balance that consciousness with my passionate heartfelt honest view of what I see. I couldn’t do it otherwise.
***
Related links:
These days, I approach reviewing with a mixture of my past and my present: I try to “place” or “situate” a book in relation to other books like it from more or less the same period or genre--that’s very generally speaking, I know, but that’s as much as I confess to as someone taught to read that way--and, I always give a healthy dose of my own personal reaction to it. Of course, that “personal reaction” comes loaded with many biases (as I mentioned here before), but I feel much more willing to commit to my own personal reactions than I do to scholarly approaches. It took a while getting here, but I’m happy where I am.
And yes, I have also enjoyed writing for established publications like the CRB and Caribbean Beat, where I have to be mindful of their philosophical approaches to reviewing. (Luckily for me, my biggest challenge to date has been working within a given word count.) And I also like reading the reviews in Calabash and SX Salon. Anyone who reads reviews regularly will recognize (as I do) that reviewers are not equal--some obviously know more than others and are more practiced at analysis--but I don’t necessarily believe in a hierarchy of reviews purely based on the publication in which they appear (can you spot the error in the first paragraph of this NYT review?) So I was thrilled to see my blog review of Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences alongside other scholarly ones on his Peepal Tree Press author page.
In my little cranky corner here where I continue to stretch my thoughts as far as I can, and then some more, and where I feel comfortable being in public to some degree, I’m nevertheless always conscious of the unbalanced nature of the world of books and writers, and as my readership grows, I am becoming less willing to completely slam a book written by a Caribbean writer. But I intend to continue to balance that consciousness with my passionate heartfelt honest view of what I see. I couldn’t do it otherwise.
***
Related links:
--Publishers Weekly [Interview, May 2011]: Indian author and critic Nilanjana Roy’s responds to “what, if any, are the critics’ responsibilities?”: Be honest, be merciless, be humble, and when you do offer praise, be generous. None of this matters unless you’re honest, and the honesty won’t matter much unless you’re a relentlessly curious reader. Read a lot; read with discrimination, but read voraciously; develop your own tastes and be open about them, own your opinions, and be prepared to change them as your reading changes. And quit if reading ever becomes a chore.
--WhereRU [Video, October 2009]: “Rutgers University Libraries Adapt to Students’ Needs.”
--The Daily Beast [Blog, May 2011]: "The Future of Book Reviews: Critics vs. Amazon Reviewers."
--WhereRU [Video, October 2009]: “Rutgers University Libraries Adapt to Students’ Needs.”
--The Daily Beast [Blog, May 2011]: "The Future of Book Reviews: Critics vs. Amazon Reviewers."
