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Felix Purat's avatar

This is a very useful article, I appreciate Inner Life posting it here since I've been taking the time to learn lessons from my Ernaux reviews, which may have, at times, appeared to some like the revenge posts you mention here. 😇 (They're not: rather, I expose certain hidden motives that, for certain reasons, I just can't reveal objectively)

In terms of whether we need book reviews, part of the reason I do series' like this is that in the world of oversaturation, a lot of "cleaning house" needs to happen. Book reviews can help with that. In the case of my Nobel series, readers can know which are the most worthwhile books (which I place on my charts objectively, even if the review itself might differ) and which ones they can avoid, unless they end up becoming a fan; something that is also more likely if people know where to start. Almost all the people I've met who dislike Dostoyevsky have one thing in common: they read The Idiot first, when they should have started with Crime and Punishment. Suffice to say there are a lot of utilitarian functions book reviews still have today. Making sense of oversaturation is one such function.

Don't know about those reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. In the long term those casual reviews don't tell a prospective reader nearly enough of what they need to know. And they hinder the process of rediscovery. That is good news for Substack: if Ted Gioia is right about the return of long-form content, then that could also mean a return of longer, more detailed book reviews.

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Joshua Doležal's avatar

One of my creative writing mentors, whom I'll not name here, confided to me once that he held back a lot of his honest opinion while blurbing a younger writer's book. What you don't touch on, Terry, is that blurbing is a version of book reviewing that is purely driven by marketing. This is one of the curses of becoming a well-known author -- you become deluged by blurb requests (not that I have experienced this, personally, but it's a common complaint). My mentor had been asked to write a blurb that would then figure prominently on the back cover and in the online description. He told me that it was a young man's book, and that some parts of it were silly, like being "mad at" a certain city. But he also confessed that in his line of work there were no upsides to criticizing a work -- you either did the blurb and wrote a nice one or you refused.

There is a side of this that parallels the social media phenomenon of "liking" everything. It's kind of the opposite of trolling. Neither is terribly productive, I don't think, because I've read a lot of glowing blurbs and reviews that oversold the work. And then I was either disappointed or a little miffed at the dishonesty.

But I know the pain of a petty review. One of the Amazon reviews of my memoir was written by someone who seemed angry about my book for reasons I still don't quite understand. Many of his criticisms seemed to be critiques of the memoir genre, itself, not really my own writing. For instance, we all kind of have to position ourselves as the protagonist in our memoirs, and we have to clarify the stakes of our stories. What one person sees as compelling stakes, I suppose another reader might see as melodrama. Hard to please everyone. But that review lives on.

As a result of my own experience, I'll admit that I don't read any of the reviews or blurbs before buying a book. It all feels like either marketing tripe or one-note congratulation. Bad reviews quite often negate themselves, the way whiny student evaluations do. I know there are some thoughtful reviewers like you out there, but I really wonder if it's worth your time to weigh in because your thoughtful points will be jumbled up with a lot of other noise. At the same time, I'd dearly love for a reviewer like you to review my memoir on Amazon, not just to drive up the gold stars, but to know that the work resonated with you. So perhaps Philippa has the best approach: if you don't have something nice to say, keep it to yourself, but if you do like a work, saying so in a review will at least mean something to the author, perhaps because of all the other insipid reviews.

Now you have me thinking, which is the highest compliment I can give -- count it as my review of your post!

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