‘Literary Death Spiral? The Fading Book Section’
"And there is a literary death spiral. The less we read books, the less we read journalism; the less we read journalism, the less we read books. Reading skills atrophy or, worse, were never properly acquired to their fullest." - Dick Meyers, NPR, via Michael Greer on the Yahoo Self-Publishing list.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
I’m glad the book section is dying. Most book sections never reviewed any books I was interested in and I think they are generally populated by a lot of self-important reviewers who think they know better than anyone else. Since the rise of the internet book sections have become more and more irrelevant. Good riddance. The snide self-importance of the quote, itself, is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Funny, Paul. I find net.reviews of less interest to me than those in the book sections. We need both kinds!
Thanks,
David
February 19th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
I, also, am repelled by this sort of inflated self-importance. Goodness, I thought literary reading was actually up in the US …
February 20th, 2009 at 6:22 am
According to National Endowment for the Arts literary reading is up by 3.5% since 2002 which is a good news after more than 20 years of declining readership. I think I read about this in Times.
February 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Although I buy a lot of books every year, both e and p, I rarely ever read a traditional newspaper book review. Even my Sunday NY Times Book Review section goes unread. Like Paul, the newspaper reviews rarely discuss a book I’m at all interested in and when they do, I don’t find the reviews informative.
Similarly, I rarely ever read an online review. But here the problem is different: I have no confidence in the reviewer him-/herself. The problem with online reviews is that anyone can write them and too often reviewers have axes to grind.
Having said that, I highly recommend the New York Review of Books. I have a long-term subscription to the NYRB. I am not always interested in the books under review, but I find even those reviews interesting and well-written. My biggest gripe with the NYRB is the narrowness of the genres it reviews. I have yet to see, for example, a review of science fiction books.
I think there is a need for quality book reviews simply to help sort the wheat from the chaff in publishing, especially with the vast numbers of books available and the number being self-published. The difficulty is in finding quality book reviewers.