I’ve been thinking lately about the role of book reviews and book reviewers, and happily for me, some smart people have been saying smart things on this topic. Charlie Jane Anders wrote a blog post entitled “What Are Book Critics For?”, considering the tension between critic as flaw-finder and critic as cheerleader. My pal Renay considered the incentives, and more often the disincentives, to reviewing books in an era where the boundaries between reader, reviewer, and author are porous to nonexistent. Renay writes:
To have a deeper discourse, we also need to talk to and with each other, not simply at one another. We need to hold space for disagreements and different readings of a text. We need to be better about showing our work and backing up our claims. And more critically, when we do talk to one another we need to do so from a place of compassion, empathy, and good faith.
When I feel nostalgic for the heyday of blogging, the thing I feel nostalgic for is the ability to talk to and with people whose opinions I came to know and respect, even (well, mostly even) when we disagreed. There was something really magical about those moments when everyone on your blogroll was reading the same book and having opinions about it and chattering in each other’s comments about why this or that element worked better or worse for you or them. I loved the way blogs could be a space for thinking together, a collaborative and communal exercise in understanding books and how they work.
Every take I ever see about book reviews agrees that the true solution is MORE. More reviewer spaces, more types of reviews, more cheerleading, more flaw-finding, more long-form analysis that doesn’t worry about spoilers, more spoiler-free overviews that help you decide whether to pick up that book or not. Yet the problem with asking for MORE is that the things we want already exist; we’re just not spending time on them. It’s all well and good to say that we want in-depth criticism, but the cold fact is that listicles are getting all the engagement and all the pick-up, and it’s exhausting to pour hard work into a piece of writing and then feeling like you’ve cast that hard work into a void.
MORE isn’t enough. What we want isn’t just the MORE, but the things that ideally would go along with MORE. If the value lives in the exchange of ideas, then it doesn’t help to have MORE ideas all sitting quietly on their separate, distant shelves. This is a criticism of myself, by the way. I’m talking about me. I miss out on, conservatively, 50% of what’s being written by critics I admire, and when they’ve written something I like, I’m fearful to start a conversation about an aspect of their piece that I’d like to think through more fully with them, because who am I to presume they want to think together with me?
I mostly save it for group chats. I do excellent together-thinking in my group chats. Other people’s brains—did you know?—have completely different thoughts in them. It’s rad.
You can’t think together without some level of trust in the other guy; and you can’t trust the other guy when it’s the internet. As I’ve been writing this, I keep going back and taking out sentences that smack of Twitter brain, that impulse to write against the hostile assumptions of the worst-faith reader I can imagine. (How dare I say we piss on the poor?) Somewhere along the way, I came to think of that worst-faith reader as the default one, and the thing is that I am not even wrong. The less aligned your identity is with the white capitalist heteropatriarchy, the more that worst-faith reader really is your default reader; the more numerous they are; the less grace they’re inclined to give you; the more they’re willing to stomp into your mentions to tell you all about it. Because social media is the place where obnoxious people come to pick fights, and there is no place where well-intentioned people go to learn from each other, it’s really hard to abandon the default assumption that any specific disagree-er is there to pick a fight with you. (And well-intentioned people who want to learn from you also get very exhausting at scale.)
These are not circumstances conducive to an open and generous exchange of ideas. These are circumstances conducive to certainty and consensus. They’re circumstances conducive to proving you’re not an obnoxious reply guy by being warm and positive and cuddly with a new mutual for a good four years before you consider venturing a minor dissent (regarding a low-stakes matter that neither of you cares that much about).
All this contributes to a reviewing environment where the goal isn’t thinking together so much as affirming shared values. I love affirming shared values, don’t get me wrong! It’s just that values aren’t the only thing reviews can speak to. And if one of the shared values is “good books from a diverse range of authors continue to get published”—a value I hold very strongly and sincerely—then it’s hard to make a case for saying a book is bad. Would my time not be better spent in touting the joys of the books I do like? If I indeed want books like this to continue to get published, might I simply keep my low opinion of this specific book to myself?
But! If there is a moral reason for my dislike of a book, then a new set of shared values comes into play. I am now no longer making an innocent author sad for no reason, cruelly. This is a whole other thing! I am protecting other readers now! From harm!
As is probably obvious, I think this is a bad, reductive, exhausting way to understand book criticism: promotional until the author does a Transgression, at which point it becomes a righteous obligation to Name the Harm. At its worst, this is a framework for book criticism that grants permission for social media pile-ons of authors whose work has been judged harmful. Should reviewers talk about it when a book fails on moral grounds? Hell yeah. Should they feel free to consider an author’s utter shittiness as a human being when they’re reviewing their work? Absolutely; I do it all the time. I just don’t want the morality of a book to be the only thing about it that matters.
If reviews are understood as a straight up-or-down vote, then reviewers aren’t starting a conversation. We’re finishing one, and slamming the door behind us. Like everyone else, I’m hungry for MORE, and the more I want is the space to think together about interesting media with smart people I admire.