There is something magical that happens for authors when they see that a reader, and especially a reviewer, really “gets” a book, when the level of engagement with the text is profound, insightful and original.  Straight praise is great—who doesn’t appreciate superlatives?—but  I thrill to reviews that connect a single very good book with the wider world,  that open up its particular theme in a way that makes me shout, yes, that’s right. (My children are accustomed to hearing me talk to books, screens and magazines).  What was particularly lovely about this piece was that the reviewer, Hans Rollman, also got the point of Akashic’s whole Noir project. Akashic has been publishing collections that focus on cities throughout the world, creating narrative maps of places from Istanbul to Boston, Addis Ababa to  Brooklyn.  Each story is set in a particular neighborhood, and though the books portray their subjects in “a chipped and jaded light” I agree that ”the Akashic Noir collections give a truly alternative and grassroots voice to the cities of the world, and the power of that voice conveys something beyond the noir style that is its medium.”

Akashic launched Tehran Noir and Tel Aviv Noir simultaneously, at a panel discussion at the New York Public Library.  I’ve written here before about the effect of watching Israeli and Iranian authors share the stage to discuss both craft and country—it’s not something one usually encounters.  As Jane noted in her post, publishing can be a volatile business and sometimes a venal one, but moments like that remind me what books can do.

In any event, whatever pleasure I experience from good reviews must be a faint echo of yours.  Have you had a review that made your heart sing? What is it about the feeling that someone really “gets” your work?

But I’ve gotta be honest: wasting a lot of time working to discourage other people from liking what they like just isn’t my thing.  Maybe that’s why I work in a job that’s all about telling people about new things they should love.  Years after seeing a presentation by Tumblr creator David Karp, I still use as an example of creative genius that Tumblr was created without comments so that anyone who wants to add their two cents has to reblog—essentially putting their sentiments onto the page they own, which forces people to consider whether they want to be known by their vitriol.  It’s a brilliant way around the problem that the internet is a toxic cesspit of anonymous rage, but it’s also a goal I can get behind.

I love a clever piece of writing as much as the next person, but reviewers who endeavor to destroy what they’ve read (or seen or heard or eaten) with the might of their pen just irk me.  I never fall in love with the angry reviews that make the rounds, and I’m not sure I see the point in excoriating a thing that people worked hard to create.  (Sure, they didn’t always work hard, but there’s only so much joy in taking down an easy target.)  I mean, I’ve been known to bitch when something gets tons of praise heaped upon it that seems to miss every flaw that I found glaring (I’m looking at you, film adaptation of Silver Linings Playbook), but I’ve only ever looked at negative reviews when I’m looking to confirm that it is right and just for me to dislike a thing I already dislike.

Criticism is an art form, and I think negative critiques have their place, but to me it’s more of an academic need than a practical one.  One of the reasons I don’t really read reviews is that I’m not terribly interested in what people who hate things have to say about them.  I’ve never read a bad review and thought, “Oh, okay, I can skip that,” because it so often seems like the reviewer, be they a highly regarded professional or a person on Goodreads, has an axe to grind.  Fortunately, for people like me, there’s BuzzFeed, and for anyone who wants an aggressive critique rather than simply an opportunity to find something new to check out there’s virtually the entirety of Kirkus and a certain someone at the New York Times.

*I prefer to think of myself as intellectually thorough.

So cheers to good books that can’t be experienced any other way than through the written word. Gatsby was flawed from the start. People have tried to make the movie before…and all have failed. Some other good examples of poor movie adaptations:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: The man’s a genius. Again, another flawed project from the start—it was near impossible for this movie to live up to the book. Nobody does McCarthy better than McCarthy.

Any one of the Harry Potter movies: I know a lot of people liked these movies, but as someone who read the books, I can tell you that they don’t compare. So much was missing. Great parts were inevitably left out, and I was inevitably let down.

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: This was truly the worst adaptation of a book I’ve ever seen. The whole film was one unfortunate event after another. Someone during my show time screamed out, “My eyes!” and ran crying from theater only twenty minutes in.

My question to you is: why? Why are the books always better? What does the written word evoke that motion pictures can’t? Is it simply the element of surprise or something more? Can you think of a movie that defies this unwritten rule and surpasses its source material?

Of course, we should all learn to play nice, but whether or not we should doesn’t always matter. And it’s hard to deny the entertainment value in a good sparring with words—especially when the insults fall on those far away from ourselves. When the L Magazine posted this slideshow of some of the most delightful author-on-author barbs, I couldn’t help but giggle.

Who’d have thought Charlotte Bronte had thoughts as snarky and as vicious as:

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride and Prejudice’…than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”

I’ll admit, this one is my favorite, just because it seems so unexpected.

Pro tip: it’s best not to think about how the authors on the receiving end might have felt after reading these comments. As tough as Hemingway made himself out to be, I can’t help but think he’s also a bit of a softie (I read The Paris Wife, okay? I know these things) and feel a little sorry for poor Papa getting all this flack for his writing.

So, while I’m not condoning flinging insults at our peers, per se, perhaps once in a while, it’s okay to appreciate the occasional carefully worded (and sometimes accurate) put-down. Especially when they’re just so colorful!

Nazaryn, a successful journalist, spent ten years trying to sell a first novel, working with various agents—all of whom recognized his talent, and one of whom bragged that he received only six figure offers—but to no avail.  The book did not sell, and Nazaryn spirits were understandably  low.

He writes: “ I had started reviewing books, a dangerous occupation for an aspiring novelist, sort of like inviting an arsonist to join the fire department. As my own rejection letters piled up, it became unbearable to stomach the notion that others — many of whom seemed, from their biographies, to have sacrificed much less than I had — were being celebrated while I lurked in the byways of the literary world.

Consequently, the reviews I wrote came to bear a stench of bitterness, none more so than one I wrote for the Village Voice in 2008 in which I took on two debut novelists, Keith Gessen and Nathaniel Rich. After comparing them to James Joyce and Ralph Ellison, I proceed to snidely savage their work. It is true: I did not like their novels. But my dislike was set aflame by jealousy of young men whose profiles were similar to mine and who had managed to do what I had not. I remain more embarrassed by that piece than by any other. Keith, Nate: I am sorry.”

I imagine Keith and Nate felt just a bit vindicated. I know few authors who do not, at some level, take reviews quite personally.  It is something of a truism that savage reviews are written by frustrated writers, but in this case the truism was true.

It’s also worth pointing out that envy is not only an issue for struggling unpublished writers.  When I was an editor, I encountered a bestselling author who seemed utterly incapable of appreciating his own success.  Stuck on the book industry’s own version of the hedonic  treadmill, he was obsessed with the commercial writers who outsold him, and desperate for the praise of the literary community.

How do you guys cope with envy?

In case you missed the snarky fun, last week The Millions ran a provocative article on the demise of the book review. I’m not sure that I agree that the book review is a dying art, and the art of pronouncing things dead (like the publishing business) is certainly thriving, but it is true that I rarely read literary hatchet jobs—and when I do, some sophomoric bit of me thrills at the claws-out, gleeful malice that seems evident in every line.  Bad reviews are, I imagine, both fun and easy to write, perhaps even more satisfying than flinging an offending volume across the room, which can become an expensive habit if you use an e-reader. Thoughtful ones are more challenging, and reviews that reveal and transfigure a book’s contents (rather than the biases of the reviewer) are few and far between.  Unqualified raves, meanwhile, seem undignified, insufficiently serious. Most of the time.   Earlier this month the NYTBR ran Christopher Buckley’s love letter of a review of MORTALITY, Christopher Hitchens’ posthumously published collections of essays.

A few days later, in the letters section, I was interested to note that at least one reader found Buckley’s rosy review problematic. Irate in Armonk wrote “Buckley’s review reads like another tribute from the vast boys’ club of Hitchens’s intimates. I’m sure many authors would like to have their books reviewed in The New York Times by their friends, but that wouldn’t serve your readers. Neither did this review.”

His criticism brought to mind a particularly pungent line from the Millions essay that called the “nauseating chumminess of the publishing world… the Scylla of book criticism.” He called “Reviewerly narcissism… its Charybdis.”  Touche.

I’m curious to know if you can cite any particularly illuminating or excoriating reviews, and  if you believe the book review is dying or finding a new life online.

“Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace.”

Really? Sure there are slow writers—in his essay he singles out Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt and contrasts them unfavorably with the prolific John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Saul Bellow—but given the pressure any published writer is under to deliver and publish on a set schedule in order to build an audience, I’m skeptical that we’re in the midst of a diabolical slow-book movement.

Garner continues: “Surely they’re in flight from the shackling apparatus of modern publishing: the long press tours (“Hello, Cleveland!”), the much-hated publicity stops.”

In this era of bare bones publicity budgets, the press tours to which he refers are hardly the norm (indeed, the “tedium” of cities like Cleveland seem like some fond, golden age memory, when book tours had not been supplanted by “twitter campaigns” or “targeted mailings”). Most authors are keen for more promotion, not less.

Garner also seems to imply that the time between books is a willful act of withholding, or worse yet, some dark means of artificially controlling the market, like DeBeers with diamonds. Perhaps Franzen and Tartt follow some strict writers’ diet, where by sheer force of will, they stop after a paragraph when they’d rather churn out pages, but I doubt it. The speed at which different people write seems to me as individual as their styles. What do you think?

Do you think that novelists have a responsibility to their readers to write more quickly? If they are slow, do they, as Garner says, forfeit their place in the cultural conversation? Or alternately, do you, like this Guardian blogger, think that these “Moses” style writers are unfairly accorded prestige because of the time in which it takes them to hand down their stone tablets http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/sep/19/literary-productivity?

Or, you might think it’s a brilliant book and that I’m a boor for being bored by it.  No matter.  The point of my rambling today is that with any other book, I might have reached that 100-page stopping point and, deciding that life’s too short, buried the novel somewhere in the lower shelves of an overstuffed bookcase never to be seen again.  But, I can’t seem to do that.  This is one of those books that I feel obligated to slog through no matter how disappointed in it I already am or how certain that the next 200 pages are not going to change my mind.  What I want to be reading for pleasure is a toothy thriller, or a frothy paranormal, or literary fare that speaks to themes I’m concerned with right now, or historical nonfiction with lots of plot twists and stranger-than-fiction characters, or a totally irredeemable celebrity memoir.  What I feel obligated to do is finish Ms. Obreht’s opus just so that I can say I did.

I’ve always struggled with the notion of virtuous reading.  On the one hand, if it weren’t for virtuous reading, my literary education would be sorely lacking in some key areas (I’m thinking of you, James Fenimore Cooper).  On the other hand, with so many great books beckoning and the certainty that I’ll never get to enjoy but a fraction of the ones on my multi-page list of things to read before I die, it really rankles to devote valuable time to something just because it’s supposed to be good for me.

Where do you fall on this issue?  Do I keep reading and pat myself on the back for my moral fortitude or chuck it and move on to some other page turner?  What would you do?

For one, it seems like there’s a lot of ink about trends and sub-genres like dystopian, time-travel, problem novels, etc., and how the current crop of book measure up (or don’t) to their predecessors.  It also feels like the reviewers go out of their way to highlight conventions and clichés, like dead mothers and green-eyed boyfriends. Even the rave review for Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace opens with a lament for the state of kids’ historical fiction.

Taken as a whole, it just feels like the readers aren’t particularly excited by these books, even the ones they like. Which makes me wonder if there’s some general YA exhaustion going on here—have the post-Twilight, high-concept, paranormal “big” YA books finally run out of steam and taken down everything else as well? On the one hand, I hope that’s not the case, because I think there are plenty of original stories to be told in YA, especially ones with more realistic settings. On the other, maybe some of the creativity will trickle down to middle-grade now, which (as I’ve written before) is in need of a serious reboot.

What do you think? Are you feeling any YA ennui? Do you find the latest crop of books just isn’t doing for you? Or am I just projecting negativity here (it is a pretty crappy day outside in NYC)? Please share!

My magazine pile has diminished the last few years as I’ve had less time to spend flipping through glossy pages. But I still like to keep up with the ultimate guilty pleasure, People, not only to follow the latest celeb gossip, but also to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s truly commercial as far as music, tv, and yes, even books. Their regular book coverage is such an unusual blend of titles, almost always paying attention to the books that everyone is talking about, the commercial ones at least. A few recent books reviewed or covered include the new John Grisham, Nora Ephron’s latest nonfiction, former White House communications director Nicolle Wallace’s first Washington novel, and Jessica Seinfeld’s second cookbook. Earlyword.com has a list of all the books they review each week. You can see the broad range of well-known and noteworthy authors, but I wonder if they don’t compromise on quality when considering what to highlight and if they don’t underestimate that their readers just might be interested in a more literary novel, or a more serious piece of nonfiction.

The coverage is limited to just a few pages per issue so there’s not a lot of room for lots of titles. Given that fact, I’m fascinated that they almost always give 3-4 stars (out of 4) to everything they review. So does that mean they only review books they think are really good? Or are they choosing titles they think their readers will enjoy? Or do they have really easy critics? Or is it just books that they know are the ones that will be getting the most publicity in other media? If the latter is the case, I’d be surprised that they are all so well reviewed. I don’t know the answers, and I think it’s probably some combination of all of these things, but I know I’m always curious to see what’s highlighted each week. And while I don’t always like their reviews or the books they choose to focus on, I am grateful that they still have a Books section at all in this difficult market!

I wonder what our readers think of People‘s choices, both in terms of what they are highlighting and reviewing, and if the reviews have any weight with consumers buying books. I’m not sure there’s much direct impact on sales, especially since so many of the titles are also covered in other media, but I do think the number of eyes the magazine gets is great publicity for any book that’s covered, especially since it’s bound to get a good review! Is People worth reading for book reviews and coverage, and have you ever purchased a book because you saw it in the magazine? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you.