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I went back and read Roger Sutton's point on all the lit blogosphere discussions again last night as well as the many many comments it prompted and it has made me think about this book reviewing on blogs business that seems to engender such a visceral reaction from those of us who do it. Bloggers wonder what each other are doing, print reviewers vs blog reviewers wonder what each other are doing and then readers (in the form of commenters at sites) throw in their own two cents about what matters to them and no one ever comes to a consensus. (Even the folks who say they have no opinion, really do when you read their comments.)

What intrigues me specifically about Roger's post is first the notion that on the internet everyone is talking more than they are listening. That one really gave me pause because yes, it does happen in the comments sometimes. But the thing is, the whole story is never just in the comments. For example, during the dual blow-ups at my site in the past ten days I exchanged emails with several commenters where we sorted out our thoughts, agreed on some points and disagreed on others but still, left it so that we felt better about each other then we had at the start. As Amy mentioned at her blog the other day, she will be in Ed's next round table discussion and so will I along with a host of other bloggers. This would not have happened probably if we had not had the BEA panel discussion here which brought us all together (for better or worse... :) . Did it get harsh sometimes and were some of us talking over others? Yes, sure. But I know some good conversation behind the scenes took place and I think that is a good thing - I think it was worth it actually. And I think it proves that a lot of listening goes on all the time that you would never know just from visiting a site.

The other thing that struck me was mostly in the comments discussion at Roger's. People started weighing in about whether or not print reviews are more important/better/professional, etc then blog reviews (yes, we were back here again) and then Roger explained that really it's just different due to the likely different audiences (librarian vs general book readers) and then mommy blogs came up (they always come up - it's like "the mommys" are taking over the world or something) and then we got this anonymous comment from someone saying it's a "just like me" thing:

However, I do believe that more and more the masses are looking for some sort of personal mirroring in their "critics" rather than being thankful that, well, someone with a lot of knowledge combed through hundreds of books (or movies or CDs) a year, each year, so that they could provide you with the best information possible.

Because only print reviewers read masses of books each year - or gain a lot of knowledge about books in the process. And then there's more:

Anyone who comes from a highly informed background (years of study or professional status, advanced degree), in essence, has the power to make the masses feel bad for their taste. Don't like the latest wildly popular, crappily illustrated picture book best seller? You're "elitist."

But not "Mom Blogger" -- she's just like you!

Okay, in reading the new issue of Booklist I started to see something really odd among several of the new adult titles. Take a look at this:

Huge by James Fuerst, Crown. (Starred Review): "The name is “Huge,” or so Eugene Smalls insists. But folks persist in applying the diminutive, since the 12-year-old is the smallest boy in his sixth-grade class. Small but mean. And tough. And hard-boiled. Just like his hero, Philip Marlowe. The wannabe detective is thrilled when his grandma hires him to find out who has defaced the sign at her retirement home. But Huge has, ahem, huge problems—anger management being only one—and his investigations may take him to dark places he’d rather not visit."

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Delacorte. (Starred Review): "Sweetness introduces a charming and engaging sleuth who is only 11 years old. Flavia is one of three precocious and extremely literate daughters being raised by English widower Colonel de Luce in 1950. Flavia’s passion is chemistry (with a special interest in poisons). She is able to pursue her passion in the fully equipped Victorian laboratory in Buckshaw, the English mansion where the de Luce family lives. The story begins with a dead snipe (with a rare stamp embedded on its beak) found on the back doorstep. This is followed by a dead human body in the garden and, later, by a poisonous custard pie. Revelations about the mysterious past of Colonel de Luce complicate matters. Others supporting players include the housekeeper, Mrs. Mullet, and the gardener, Dogger, who suffers from shell shock. When Colonel de Luce is arrested for murder, it’s up to Flavia to solve the mystery. "

The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan, Canongate: "Every night in her dreams, Gwenni flies high above her Welsh village, looking at the lives unfolding beneath her and hearing the earth’s melodic hum. The sky is her sanctuary until one night the 12-year-old sees something puzzling and deeply disturbing. The very next day Ifan Evans, the chapel deacon and husband of Gwenni’s teacher, mysteriously goes missing. Intrigued, Gwenni decides to turn detective and determine the man’s whereabouts."

The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen, Penguin (Starred Review): "The son of a laconic Montana rancher and a noted, if absentminded, coleopterist, 12-year-old prodigy Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet draws diagrammatic maps (e.g., zoological, geological, topographical) as well as maps of people shucking corn or chopping wood, drainage patterns, and a city’s electricity grid usage. The Smithsonian has been accepting illustrations, schematics, charts, and maps from T. S. for some time when Mr. Jibsen calls him to say that T. S. has won the prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science and is invited to D.C. to give a speech. Thus begins T. S.’s odyssey, and a surreal, mind-bending one it is, for sure."

So does anyone see a pattern here? Each one of these books (three of them starred reviews!) were published for adult readers. It used to be that we talked about teen protagonists crossing over to adult readers (Hello Blue Van Meer) but this - this is really interesting. What is it that makes eleven and twelve year olds so suddenly appealing to adults? Is it just the assumption that sex or romance won't be part of the plots and the authors can focus on other things? I'm reading T.S. Spivet right now and enjoying it quite alot but so far I can't see why the protagonist has to be twelve - he could just as easily be sixteen. (I'm thinking the Smithsonian would be just as freaked to find out a high school kid was making their art.) I understand authors are writing the books that they want to write and not worrying so much about audience when they write them and choose their protags (I do believe Colson Whitehead on that score) but am I missing something or is there a serious juvenile trend going on here? I mean YA/adult crossovers are one thing but MG/adult crossovers? That's getting weird.

I mean really.

I"m not saying that adults can't enjoy a book with a child protagonist - we all know and love Tom Sawyer and Scout and all those other classics that have stood the test of time and that's great. But this whole teen trend thing that seemed such a big deal with Special Topics in Calamity Physics is starting to look like vamp novels look in YA. In other words these preternaturally smart children are starting to crop up everywhere and I wish I knew why. Do we really need 12 year olds to solve crime now? I know there are some wickedly smart kids out there (they show up later as adults commenting on blogs with claims that they read Lord of the Rings when they were like five) but most of the ones I have known are overly concerned about having the right shoes, watching their favorite shows and whining about everything. Lately my eleven year old niece cares only about texting her friends and asking them what they are doing. No one is ever doing anything but they still feel compelled to ask each other constantly. (And she can't even go to the local Fred Meyers alone so solving crime seems a bit beyond her capabilities.)

I would not want anyone in her group to be responsible for clearing me of murder charges.

I guess what you have here are characters that are deemed by someone to be too smart for readers their own age, apparently not sexy or smart assed enough for readers a couple of years older, but so quirky they endear themselves to adult readers who want to reminisce about the child they think they were. For the record I like TS Spivet because I am a big fan of maps and illustrated novels. (See Barbara Hodgson's titles for more examples.) I am not pursuing my literary childhood ideal. I swear. Really. (REALLY!)

But what the heck is everybody doing reading these books? And who decides that liking these books makes you literary but admiring Gilda Joyce makes you an adult who refuses to grow up? (There's a new Gilda novel out next week by the way - The Dead Drop. I haven't heard a thing about this one until I saw it in Booklist where it got a very positive review.) I don't even care who they are written for anymore, now I'm more into the marketing. It's like the dumbing down of America's juveniles or something - all the really smart kids have to be in books written for adults.

Okay, that's not true but still, I wish I knew how child protags for adults vs child protags for children are chosen. It almost makes me want to read all of these books just to see what they've got in common. Almost but not quite. Maybe I'll just wait and see what wunderkid novels show up in the next issue of Booklist. There better not be any seven year olds...I have one of those of my own and believe me, it won't work, I don't care how quirky the kid is.

I ventured into my office on Saturday with the intention of sorting through the piles and piles (and piles) of books that have gathered there in the past couple of months. I do this several times a year, partly to remind myself what I have down there and also to figure out where I fit books for a review. In order to keep some kind of order in the house, when books arrive I make a pretty quick "yes/no" decision. Some books I know I will never review and those go immediately into the garage for donation. The ones I know for sure I've been waiting for go downstairs and the ones that I think maybe might work, or that I'm intrigued by, or that I secretly wanted and yet never requested (Hello Paul Collins' Book of William) all go down to the office as well. Over a couple of months everything always seems to merge into one big pile of non order and then I know I have to spend an hour or two dealing with it.

Not that this is exactly torture, mind you. Two hours of sorting books is pretty much my zen happy place if you know what I mean!

Here's what I'm dealing with down the line for Bookslut:

June: Coming-of-age stories. This column is completely done.

July: Small adventures. I have five books reviewed for this column and I'm reading a sixth which I plan to include. This leaves room for another review, maybe - if I find a book that fits. Right now I would really like another book with a boy protagonist or with a minority protagonist to go in here. That was part of what I was looking for on Saturday but I'm still not sure. I also have to choose my "Cool Read" but I have a picture book idea for that.

August: Road trips. Right now I have three books planned for sure for this column - one of which is a nonfiction which delights me to no end. (The others split nicely into a boy book and girl book.) I obviously need more books here. I have one I requested from S&S that is due out this month (You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith) and that would work with the theme but I don't have it yet. I have a few other possibilities - books that don't directly involve car trips but do involve travel and I might just broaden the theme so I can include them. (Two boats and a plane!) Not much reading done for this column yet though.

September: Fly me to the Moon. This is the Apollo 11 anniversary column, or all thing moonish. I know the actual anniversary is in July but I like doing fiction for summer reading and also I figure lots of kids will be talking about this when they go back to school in science class. (At least I hope they will - who knows.) I have four books for the column already including Tonya Lee Stone's fabulous Almost Astronauts. There's one book I'm waiting on from S&S: T-Minus, a graphic novel by Jim Ottaviani. I requested it, so it should arrive. I'm a big fan of Jim's work and really looking forward to what he does here. This column then, though largely unread, is already plotted.

October: Bradbury Weather. I have been doing an "October Country" column for this month in the past, but there aren't a lot of creepy/scary books out that I'm really interested in. (Call it vamp burnout.) So I thought I'd just broaden it to more of a Bradburyish type theme this year. Sideshow will fit nicely in here as would Liz Hand's upcoming YA title Wonderwall which I'm quite excited about. Holly Black also has book 2 of her Good Neighbors series due out this fall and the first graphic novel surprised me very much (loved the snark) so that is three titles thus far. More to come I'm sure.

November: Right now I have no theme for November although I'm leaning in two directions; one would be a "school dazed" type theme of books about coping with school pressures or set primarily in school with school issues, the second would be more a cool books for English Class which I've done in the past and would include a new YA Hemingway biography from Catherine Reef, Lady Macbeth's Daughter from the always fabulous Lisa Klein (loved her remake of Hamlet, Ophelia) and a Hamlet remake from John Marsden that just arrived here the other day with a note inside from Chris Crutcher stating "John Marsden has done what a legion of educators, my parents, a great number of more literate friends and my read-anything-you-can-get-your-hands-on grandmother failed to do. He has made me, for one glorious moment, love Shakespeare."

As someone who pretty much loathes Shakespeare (blame high school Brit Lit for that one) Crutcher's note made me pause long and hard and then put this book on the downstairs pile as opposed to right into donate. (And believe me, that is where it was going.) So brilliant marketing ploy on the part of Candlewick and a book that would fit perfectly into that English Class plan, if that is where I'm going. The Collins book on the Shakespeare portfolios, although published for adults, could also fit here if it reads as something high school teens would like. (And based on his other books, I bet it will.)

December is also up in the air so I could just make November "English Class" and December "School Dazed" and then move into January with "good winter reads". I'm really not sure. I generally try to make December a fun reading month - recommending several books that have nothing in common other than the fact that I enjoy them because I figure people are looking for that during that month. (So December could be "good reads" and January cold be "School Dazed" - am I really plotting a column for January 2010?????) It's hard to figure exactly what I want to do and much of this relies on what I have and what I receive. Right now the columns through September are pretty much set in stone, theme-wise (heck June, July and September are largely done as far as what specific titles will be reviewed in them). But then I see a book like Claire Zulkey's An Off Year, about Cecily who has always done the right thing and then shows up to college and decides not to go - setting off an unexpected gap year "during which Cecily must ask herself, for the first time, what does she really want to do with her life?" and I think, well, that could be a good book and I'd like to see how Zulkey handles that whole gap year idea. But where do you fit that book exactly? ("School Dazed" I suppose - but it depends on how the other books fit in there as well.)

So you can see why I go downstairs and spend a few hours sorting and thinking and reconsidering just what should go where.

On top of all this I'm still juggling broader groups over at Eclectica, where each quarter I have group reviews of biographies or poetry or history. In the current issue I have Biographies and Books About the Great Outdoors (with Jason Chin's fabulous Redwoods and a new Jane Yolen poetry title) and this summer I will have a picture books round-up and probably some "you don't know you're learning when you read these books" round-up. Maybe art titles too. I was putting together a historical picture books round-up and then realized that I have a bunch of Revolutionary War books on hand and several others on the way in the coming months, so I think October's issue will have a "Say You Want a Revolution, Mr. Adams" round-up. These reviews grow organically almost with me reviewing books continuously until I see that I have enough to submit as a unique group. A theme always emerges on its own which is very cool and low key at the same time. It's part of why I love writing for Eclectica (and I think why readers enjoy these collective reviews so much.)

So....that was my Saturday, or at least part of it. Several books went back upstairs to the donate bags as I realized that I was not going to get to them. Sometimes I will sit on a book for more than a year until I can figure out where it fits (Tamar was this way, as was Chameleon by Charles R Smith which is in my June column), but that is sort of rare. I tend to be ruthless just because I have to be - there are always more books showing up at my door. (If I really like a book then it will go somewhere, eventually - I guarantee that.) But still, however odd and subjective the system might be it does eventually work. One of the car books for August is over a year old and several of the fantasies in my May column are six months or so. I'm not really worried about release date but group cohesion. What's interesting is that when a book shows up I often have no idea how it will fit, until the next time I go downstairs, analyze the pile and then suddenly - it all works.

And I get to see my floor again too!

My June column is coming-of-age type books, one of the most common themes in YA literature. I have a couple of reviews already written, another title already read and I'm working on a couple of others. As usual at this stage it is all about balance - mostly girl books versus boy books which is the eternal struggle in reviewing YA lit but I'm also trying to be more ethnically balanced in every single fiction column I do. (Which was basically impossible with my mystery column next month.) That challenge has brought me to Chameleon by Charles R. Smith. This is Smith's first YA novel but he is well known for other titles, most specifically the amazing Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali which was spectacularly illustrated by Bryan Collier. (I adore that book.) Chameleon is about a teenage boy and the summer before he starts high school. Shawn is bright and likable, he has three good friends he hangs out with and they do a lot of funny trash talk, play a lot of basketball, try not to fall in love with one of the guy's sisters (she is a knockout) and have actual conversations with girls they do have an actual shot at (shades of Harry Potter and Cho). I'm 100 pages into the book and it's very funny; I like Shawn a lot and find him quite easy to identify with and it should be cake to review this book, except.......

...except this is a book about four African American teenage boys who spend the summer in Compton and have to be careful what color shorts they put on each morning because they could get the crap beat out of them (or worse) by one of two competing gangs if seen wearing the wrong colors on the wrong court. I get Shawn when he is embarrassed about his aunt's drinking problem; I get him when he talks to his mom about seeing his dad that weekend (product of a broken home - I totally get that); I get him when is blown away by how gorgeous his buddy's sister is and I get him when he gets tongue tied with Marisol, his classmate who he can barely speak to because he has such a jumbo crush on her. But what does my very white skinned suburban beach town inner teenage girl know about four black kids in Compton dodging gangs? I can't review this book as authentic or realistic on that score because I know nothing about it. But I also know nothing about time travel or rocket ships (or living in an alternate history 1938 Scotland) and I've reviewed those books. I've reviewed books about teenage girls in NYC and LA and the Heartland. Heck, I'm planning to review Melissa Wyatt's Funny How Things Change in June which is about a teenage boy in West Virginia.(Loved it) I know nothing about any of these places or the kids who live there but I find myself able to identify with them. I also identify in many ways with Shawn, but in some major ways I don't. Because I can't. And while I could certainly misfire on reviewing Wyatt's West Virginia setting, I doubt I will get slammed as much as if I misfired on Smith's Compton location or the realism in his portrayal of the "DMZ" (Shawn's word) the boys navigate on a daily basis.

So what is a reviewer to do?

Obviously I am going to review Chameleon (as long as it holds up as well as it has been thus far). It's a good book and good books need to be reviewed. It also happens to be a good boy book which I love to find and shed some extra light on. But as a white reviewer I wonder if there are some aspects of the book I should gloss over - do I just say that Shawn dodges gangs while hanging out with his friends and leave it at that? Do I concentrate more on the stuff that is in my comfort zone (family relationships, dating, etc.)? What is the right thing to do in this case - what is the best thing for the book and potential readers?

Hmmmmm.

I can say what I think of the book but the one thing I did take away from the bits of the RaceFail discussion I read was that as a white person I might very well be missing some grave missteps in Chameleon. Charles R. Smith Jr. happens to be an African American man who obviously was once an African American teenage boy so I'm inclined to think that he knows what he's writing about. But I don't know if he knows anything about Compton (according to his site he did grow up in CA). Do I just trust him? But we've all trusted authors before and when they're wrong - well, they are seriously wrong.

The book is good; the characters are compelling, the setting is vividly described. I feel like I am learning about Shawn's world and I certainly want to keep turning the pages to learn more. I'm just concerned about how to explain all of this - unless maybe it is as simple as admitting what I don't know in the review and praising Smith for writing a book about a place I've never been and situations I've never experienced and making them real to me. Maybe that is the best I can do. I just hope it turns out to be enough - and more importantly - fair to the book and the author and to kids who do know this world.

My reviews on nature and biography titles for kids are all written and off to the Eclectica copy editor so those books are now off the table. Next up is the review for Booklist and the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling adult fairy tales piece which will be done today. And then maybe two books for my fantasy column. I've been trying to decide if the Poe Anthology should be reviewed in my mystery column or my fantasy column. It is marketed as dark fantasy (and not YA but I think it works for older teens just fine) but Poe has always seemed more mysterious to me than fantastic (horribly mysterious I guess) and some of the stories are certainly only barely fantasy. Either way I'm enjoying it a lot and really enjoying seeing how so many different people react to Poe so differently - how they were inspired to write such vastly different works. I will be reviewing some of the stories indepth here as my column only gives me a couple of paragraphs for the whole book.

And speaking of my column, the new issue of Bookslut is up. My theme this month was books on international relations or politics. It was a very hard column to write - the books are full of a lot of information and I wanted to be sure to convey how they target their subjects in a significant and thoughtful manner while still remaining quite readable. They are really good books - really really good books - and I was happy to find a group that I think does a good job of bringing the world to high school students. There are also two novels (one a new entry in a mystery series for adults and one written for MG readers). I think this is one of the strongest column I have put together yet which has gotten me thinking about just what these columns - this job - means to me as a reviewer.

I like doing it. I like doing it a lot.

Bookslut gets a lot of visitors each month and while I have no idea how many of them read my column in particular I assume it is quite a few. I've been trying not to skate over there - not to just write up the standard YA titles or plots. This is my second primarily NF column this year and I plan a third one (tentatively this summer). I've been trying to integrate graphic novels in wherever I can and the occasional title published for adults that works well for teens. I probably go lightest on YA romance as that is a genre I don't seem to review well. (It's not that I don't like or respect romance novels it's that I get frustrated when teenagers act like teenagers in love - which is the point with those books so you can see my problem.) I just keep trying to find what is a bit different or a bit exceptional or a bit of a surprise and give it some attention. I know that writing about books on Iran and Iraq (among other locations) is maybe a stretch for a YA column but I really wanted to do this; I really felt like i needed to do it. And the books are great.

Sometimes I wonder what my priorities are or should be when it comes to writing and reviewing. The column does take a lot of my time but still - how often do you get a chance to trumpet your horn for books you love to such a large audience? How often do you get to be heard by so many about something you love?

Not too many adults - let alone teens - want to read books about war and I understand that. I don't love reading them all that much either. But I did want to write about them and I'm glad that I had such a good place to do so.

Now onto Poe and some fantasy and some coming-of-age and then maybe biography and then August which I think will be titles for the dog days of summer. I'm more than halfway through the year and it's only March - can you imagine?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who crams things into closets when company comes. We did a pretty good job of keeping the hiding to a minimum this time (or at least I thought we did) so I wasn't expecting much as I started gathering things Saturday night. Some dirty clothes, a few puzzles and games (don't know why those just weren't put away) and some books. And some more books. And a lot more books.

A lot of freaking books in a lot of freaking places.

I'm looking right now at about 25 books I need to review. This never happens to me - I can't believe that it is happening to me right now. I'm generally very far ahead in my reviews (I already have my April column nearly complete and have started on both May and June) but these books, most of them picture books, have been read in various parts of the house and set aside and.....um.....forgotten. And then stuffed into closets. They were all over the place and I hadn't reviewed any of them.

So I'm putting together several group reviews of the picture books right now for Eclectica Magazine: poetry books, art books, nature & animals, history & biography and story books. I think I will only run the nature & animals and history & biography titles in the spring issue (live on April 1) as I could still add to the others. But regardless of when the pieces run, the reviews need to be written and I'm feeling like my life is in complete disorder until all these are written about and then shelved (or donated). (Speaking of donations I did drop 100 teen books off at Children's Hospital in SEA on Thursday so that made me feel like something was being accomplished around here.) (Many of them were reviewed but many others were duplicates or simply books I did not request and had no time to get to or no interest in reviewing.) (More than few involved vampires in some way. UGH)

Beyond the picture books I have a delightful memoir for Booklist to review. I received three books last weekend in a bit of a mad package from my editor - one needed to be read and reviewed (if possible) in five days. Fortunately it was very well written and a nature book which I enjoy so it was easy to get through. The other two are due by March 10th but I'd like to get the second review in right away now that I'm done with it. (It was hysterical and I can't wait to write about it here. It has an awesome title.)

There's also People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks and This Is Me, Jack Vance which I plan to review here and very much enjoyed. People of the Book is now out in tpb and is a nifty literary mystery that tracks the experiences of the people who created and owned a book over the centuries. Very historical with some contemporary intrigue (and drama) to boot. And Vance's autobiography is just a neat book that any fan of biography will like.

And let's see - one graphic novel for my May column on fantasy and one oversized reference book on mythological beasts for the same column. There are two historical dramas - one YA and one MG. Those will be in summer reviews - either my July column or the June issue of Eclectica. And there's The Katrina Papers which I finished a few weeks ago and will review for Voices of NOLA and Get Your War On from Soft Skull Press that I want to write up as a standalone review for Bookslut (or Eclectica if someone beats me to it over there). And there are the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling reissued adult fairy tale titles that I'm reviewing for Eclectica. Rather that write about each book independently I've been doing an overview of the stories - noting several specific ones I enjoyed and why. All of the books are good and the whole series is excellent so I think the best way I can get new readers excited about them is to point out why I found some of the stories especially appealing.

I think that's everything. Can you believe it? These are all good books - some of them are wonderful - and I'm not dreading writing the reviews at all. I just don't ever get this far behind. Ever. I think I have learned a very valuable lesson about having one place for all books waiting for reviews and avoiding closets at all costs.

Closets are evil. Remember that.

There are many other books I'm excited about right now that I'm not done reading yet. The other day I received a big coffee table field guide The Birds of North America. It's gorgeous. I was paging through it and remembered another bird book I had seen recently and went looking downstairs and found Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding by Scott Weidsensaul. The emergency book I reviewed for Booklist was also about birds and looking at all of them I started thinking about just how many bird books seem to be published these days. Not just field guides (of any size or price) but also books on the hobby of birding and chasing birds all over the world and raising birds. I'm pretty happy to see it - we all should care about birds - but I wonder what has prompted it. When did we become bird lovers again? Anyway, I think I will do a combined review of these books this spring. Why fight this obvious new trend? (And really - if you have to support a trend it should be a bird-loving one, shouldn't it?)

Now you know what I'm doing today and tomorrow (except for all those tedious other non book related things that one must do). But once I'm done - Huzzah! - the dining room table will be clear and I shall be yet again a woman in control.

This happens never again, I promise. As Sean Connery is my witness (ha): NEVER AGAIN!

In the past I have explained that I often try to use my column to recommend books rather than strictly review. This isn't necessarily a different thing as far as technical writing (even positive recommendations need to be thorough) but it does mean that if I don't like a book it will likely not show up there. I do this not because I am afraid to offend (I just turned in a review that carried the phrase "self-serving at best" for Booklist) but because I just don't have a lot of room to cover books. With more than 200,000 visitors each month to the site (no idea how many to my column) I regard that coverage as fairly important to the titles which show up there. So if I don't like a book I was planning to review, the question becomes whether or not I should give it some of that space.

In other words, how careful should I be about filling that literary real estate?

Usually negative reviews are not an issue because I don't bother finishing a book I don't like (unless it is for Booklist where the rules are set by others). At Bookslut I can review whatever books I choose to. I try to choose carefully and most of the time I don't have a problem. But in the case of War is, which I just finished last night, I was hoping very much to include it in my March column and now I just don't think I can. Ironically, the column was largely planned after I saw War is in the catalog last year. I had not written a nonfiction column on war books for teens and could see the value of it. Over the past few months as I selected titles, it shifted to a column on foreign relations (which includes war) and War Is... was still a title I planned to include. Until I finished reading it.

This is a tricky book to consider because it is a collection and in pretty much every collection there are going to be some contributions you enjoy and others you do not. I expected that. But I have to like more than I dislike and that was not the case. I found some of the selections to be outdated for the teen audience it was aimed at and others to be just odd choices that did not seem to convey much information at all. (There is a group of letters from an American soldier in WWI who saw no action and instead wrote home about being alternately thrilled and bored by Europe. As few American students know anything about this war I was confused as to why this example was chosen for the most significant conflict of the 20th century.) I also began to see some old messages presented yet again: that war is hell, but going to war makes you appreciate life more (this would be the "I didn't love life until I got a dread disease" example); that we fight for our buddies not for ideals (anyone who has ever seen The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, Black Hawk Down or any one of a million other war movies in which this was the point please raise your hand) and war is worse than you could possibly expect and will seriously screw you up (see very nearly every Vietnam movie ever made except The Green Berets, and all poems by Sigfried Sassoon who said it best).

I know it is hard to say anything new about something as old as war but that is kind of like saying you can't say anything new about life and death, period. Paul Fleischman's marvelous Dateline Troy showed how the ancient Greeks can be modernized and Three Kings blew the door off of every war movie in recent years when it showed how hypocrites can thrive even in a war zone. (Incidentally The Best Years of Our Lives brought PTSD home to American audiences in the post WWII era in an equally impressive manner.) And I'm certainly not averse to reprinting poems or excerpts from previously published materials but there should be a twist that makes the selections work as a whole rather than just..."here they are". Samuel Hynes did this quite well with The Soldier's Tale where he looked at first person accounts from soldiers who served in WWI, WWII and Vietnam (and also POW camps ,etc) to explore what war was like. This is an excellent book that takes the reader into multiple facets of the war experience and in the end reveals a great deal about what is the same and different about the three chosen conflicts. You leave it knowing more but after War is I found myself mostly just confused. (And it really didn't help that the only mention of women at war was an essay on sexual harassment and PTSD. Especially after reading I'll Pass For Your Comrade this was a cliche of mammoth proportions that left my eyes rolling.)

All of this leaves me thinking I should just pass on the review and focus more on other books for the column (another of which I could fit in now). There were certainly a couple of essays that I thought were very well done but overall the collection was unbalanced and lacked coherence about what it wanted to say and how it wanted to say it. I could say all of this in my column but I don't think I want to. It just does not seem the proper use of column inches. I have to ask myself if it is more beneficial to readers to tell them about a book I think is effective or one I believe is not. The question (the eternal question) is always "What do readers want?" That's what I spend my time trying to figure out as I form these columns and sometimes, I just don't know.

With so many posts going up over December about how publishing was dead or dying or at least desperate, I've been giving a bit of thought to just how screwed up this industry is. I find it odd that on the one hand people are getting fired left and right but on the other hand Laura Bush commands an $8 million advance. Does anyone really seriously think that book will include a single revelation about the White House years? It's not a book with any sort of staying power (not like a nonpartisan book on the Bushes by an actual presidential historian could be) and yet the ailing industry has decided she is worth it.

This makes it very hard for me to think that publishers are serious when they say they are going to change.

I could second guess these kind of decisions all day but I think the better way to show what publishers do that could be changed (and should be changed) is just to look at the numbers. How do publishers waste money everyday? One very big way is through the ARCs they send out. ARCs cost money, shipping costs money and packaging costs money. Here's how the numbers played out for me last year:

967 Total Books Received

(That number does not include comics sent for review as I don't keep track of them)

775 Books Received which were NOT Requested

I formally requested only 192 books last year. (For those of you who think that number is insane, keep in mind that at least 50 are picture books which I review for Eclectica and also that I do not receive every book I request.) (Also note that, I include all books for Booklist in that unrequested number as I have no control of what titles come my way from the ALA. That accounts for 36 of the unrequested books and obviously each of those was reviewed or rejected only after careful reading.)

It is crazy to me how many unrequested books I receive each week. I have done my best to be removed from mailing lists but it is not easy to get some publishers to leave a reviewer alone. (Yes Harper Collins I'm looking at you. Last year's total of HC titles received: 69. Why? And even though I asked to be let out of their auto mailing list, they still keep coming.)

Everyone who is part of this system knows that reviewers can't keep up with these kind of numbers and yet they are so determined to try and get their books read that they just keep sending them. It really gets frustrating when you can't even find someone to stop sending the books - when it is clear that there is no one directing the whole process of sending books to bloggers. The difference between publishers who have a point of contact and those who do not is glaring. For example, it is easy for me to contact Roaring Brook, Counterpoint/Soft Skull, Kingfisher, Candlewick, Soho Press, Tundra, Bloomsbury, etc. It is not so easy with Henry Holt, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Scholastic. Some pubs are hit or miss - easy to contact one month, a black hole the next. I keep most of my contact to a minimum when it comes to requests - basically filling out the forms when the catalogs arrive each season. I don't think that publishers should provide constant contact but I do think they should have someone on salary who has a clue about the lit blogosphere and takes the time to make sure that only requested titles are sent out to be reviewed. If they want me to consider something I haven't requested then shoot an email description my way to see if I'm interested - it's cheap and easy to send to dozens of reviewers at once (Candlewick does this quite effectively.) Am I the only one who thinks it makes more sense to pay a person to make sure money isn't wasted on pointless shipments then to just keep shipping?

I mean really - I love Charles and Emma from Henry Holt (it will be in my Feb column) but FOUR copies of the same book sent over a three month period? I don't have anyone to contact there to ask that such multiple shipments be stopped. I just keep getting them, shipped via UPS ground, in single packages with the same pages of PR copy. I'm keeping one copy of the book (it is that wonderful) and have donated the other three. I have to wonder though what kind of computer system isn't catching these continuous mistakes, and if I'm the only one to see this book over and over and over again.

There are a lot of reasons why publishing is messed up (huge advances that don't earn out, returns policies, having to "pay to play" for table placement at the big chains, etc.) but one place they should look to save some dollars is in how they market books to reviewers. A more effective computer database, packaging multiple books for a destination together and hiring an assistant to exclusively address the lit blogosphere are all things that should be considered. I know these are not impossible because some publishers do them all as a regular part of doing business. Why all of them can not (or will not) I have no idea.

Over 700 books came to my house for no reason in 2008 and I am just one reviewer. Wouldn't it be interesting to ask lit bloggers across the internet how many unrequested books they received? I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem. (And I'm not even going to start on the environmental waste of all that packaging and gas to transport these books. I'm sure it's staggering.)

My frustration with the PR department for Harper Collins Children's Books is boundless. I have written about this before (more than once) but in the past week I have been deluged by so many unrequested HC books that my frustration with this publisher is reaching epic levels. I have sent emails requesting that I be removed from their automated mailing list but no such luck; I can't even get anyone to respond to me let alone explain how I ended up the dumping ground for everything Harper Collins wants reviewed (regardless of my own preferences).

We're talking FORTY-FIVE unrequested books on my doorstep this year already.

The irony, as I have explained before, is that there are HC titles I do want to review but the PR department, while it does send out the catalogs each season, does not permit review copy requests. So the few HC titles I do want to review either end up here by dumb luck (four of them) or the authors contact me and have them sent my way (two others). Beyond that, I just take what HC sends me - and I promptly put it into a bag of donations.

Beyond how annoying this is for me (and counter productive for them) there is also the weirdness of books I receive. From the nonsense mailing of picture books for Kung Fu Panda and Prince Caspian to the shock of a hardcover edition of the new Coraline graphic novel (it's gorgeous but really - does Gaiman need to be sent out to reviewers? I'm sure I'll write about this one but it makes me think of how many authors no one has heard of that I wish I could have written about as well.) (I suppose this means that Terry Prachett's new YA novel, Nation and The Illustrated Wee Free Men are on the way here as well.)

Anyway, as I've had a bit of luck in the past by posting about books I wish I could review, I thought that would be my new method with HC. They send the catalogs, ignore my interests, seek to overwhelm me with books I'll never read and I will just post a handy list here every season and hopefully an author or illustrator will find my site and get the book sent my way.

One can only hope.

So, without further ado, here are the titles in the Fall Harper Collins Children's Catalog that piqued my interest:

Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told by Walter Dean Myers, Illustrated by Connie Christensen. Wells was on the early end of the fight for Civil Rights (she died in 1931) and completely fascinates me. I also think she has been woefully overlooked by most history textbooks so seeing Myers write a biography of her makes me quite happy. Here's a Wells quote:

"Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense."

The Little Yellow Leaf by Carin Berger. Well, she's fabulous. Berger does the loveliest collage illustrations; really really nice stuff. This is a story of autumn and one little leaf who is holding on tight to the tree and doesn't want to let go. She never disappoints and I'm sure this is a quiet beauty.

Tell the World, by WritersCorps, Foreword by Sherman Alexie. This is a collection of "...poems written by at-risk youth, all of whom have participated in poetry-writing workshops sponsored by the non-profit WritersCorps." It's poetry and teens; it needs to be widely reviewed.

This will, I promise, be the last time I speak of Harper Collins until the Spring catalogs arrive.

As discussions continue on the new blog tour for cash site that is soliciting business from YA and children's book authors, one recurring theme seems to be about bloggers writing reviews for cash or review copies. This is something that has been discussed a little bit before but I thought was worthy of its own entry. There are two issues here, really: how to get review copies from publishers and how to develop a reputation as a credible reviewer. I think the pay for blog tour seems like a harmless short cut to achieve those goals for a lot of fairly new bloggers, but it will likely come back to bite them later. I went about this whole reviewing thing a different way, and while it has taken several years I think it now places me in a fairly strong (and respected) position.

First, I did not build a personal site until a couple of years after I was reviewing for Bookslut and Eclectica Magazine. The first review copies I requested myself were for Eclectica, a few months after I started reviewing there. At Bookslut Jessa receives a ton of books and compiles a list of those available to reviewers - for the first year I chose a few books from that list every three or four months and she would send me one or two depending on what everyone else wanted. In my first year writing for both sites I received about fifty review copies that I specifically requested. As I reviewed I was always careful to contact the PR rep who sent me the book as well as the author and let them know about the review. This is how I built relationships and publishers saw the work I was doing. It became easier for me to request review copies over time and I also began receiving a lot of books I did not request. Last year I received over 700 books - I requested about 200 of them. (Yes that number is real - 700 books.) Some of the unrequested titles I did end up reviewing and in the case of some smaller publishers I am just on their automatic mailing lists so I get several books from them year round and often do review them. The reviews pretty much always run at Bookslut or Eclectica - with a few a year that are very New Orleans specific at Voices of NOLA. I also review about 20-30 books for Booklist. (Those are chosen for me by my editor there, sent to me by her and I do get paid to review them.)

After two years of reviewing at Bookslut and Eclectica I started my own blog. I have never solicited a review copy for Chasing Ray so I don't honestly know anything about how publishers choose blogs. I review for one of the oldest literary magazines on the web (12 years) that averages 50,000 unique visitors per issue (each quarter). They read us at Eclectica from around the world and we have a fairly solid reputation as a good site for fiction submissions. Bookslut is simply one of the biggest lit sites on the web - as everybody knows. It is a force unto itself and my column gets literally tens of thousands of hits each month. So when publishers send me books, they are sending them to that person - that reviewer at those two sites. If I talk about an unsolicited book at Chasing Ray I'm sure they appreciate it (better than not mentioning the book at all) but what they want is the big sites. What I write about around here is generally books I've bought myself because they are not books I feel comfortable reviewing or books that are not up for review (older books) or I will mention in a more casual manner how I feel about a book that I'm formally reviewing elsewhere.

In other words, my reputation is all about the other places where I review. Chasing Ray is just gravy on top of that - just extra. Those 700 books are not going to come to someone with a readership of a few hundred (or less) a day. If you want to get your foot in the door and build a reputation as a reviewer then doing it at your own site might not be the best place - not if receiving free books and reviewing is what you want to do. Now if the site is an outlet for many other things (like building relationships with other readers/writers, becoming part of the lit blogosphere, etc.) then it's all good. Just don't expect the publishers to beat down your door simply because you have a site. It might look like that is how other bloggers have done it, but really, under closer inspection, it's not.

The other thing is credibility. There have been discussions about whether or not bloggers are credible reviewers for years. (They are all over the blogosphere and not hard to find.) Credibility is a big sticking point right now and that is unlikely to change in the near future. So while I certainly think that bloggers deserve to be paid for work as much as the next person, keep in mind that I did not walk into a paying job at Booklist. It took years of reviewing online before I was "discovered". As it is now I review for an editor who looks at every single thing I write for them and has questioned my thoughts and asked for changes more than once. It's not a mindless gig. But having editors who are mindful of the ALA's mission are part of what makes Booklist a significant review publication - readers know the editors can be trusted and while I certainly do not have to positively review a book I do not like, I do have to have a valid reason (other than "not for me") as to why I do not like a book. I have not - at all - loved every book I've reviewed for them but I have seen the value of those books for other readers. And when I have dug my heels in and felt a book was flat out unreadable and thus unreviewable, I've made a solid case to my editor and we've moved forward from there. This is all important because when you are writing for your own site you are not challenged in any of these important ways. That makes you more vulnerable to criticism that you are an amateur and means you have to be that much more careful - and thorough - when it comes to your reviewing.

I guess the big answer I'm trying to provide here is that reviewing is like anything else - it has to be done carefully in order to succeed in the long run. Chasing Ray is the smallest and last part of how I developed my reputation in this field. It is a significant site to me (more so than any other actually) but strictly for personal reasons - because it allows me to write on and on about books I love and to communicate with other booklovers and also to comment on the difficulties I encounter with my own writing. But this site is not where things began; it is Bookslut, Eclectica and Booklist that actually brought me here. If you're trying to go in the reverse order - from your own personal site first - then you need to be mindful of the kind of obstacles you face, and how carefully your choices will have to be made.

And that is all I'm going to say on the matter. Back tomorrow with much love for Theodora Goss!

The other day Gwenda included links to several recent entries on reviewing all of which covered the many things that reviewers should be thinking and doing while reviewing. As usual, all of this as news to me. I just don't think about the process of writing about books the way a lot of other people do. The likely conclusion from this is that I'm grossly unprofessional but I never sought a job as literary critic. My thought has always been that lots of readers are just like me - looking for an idea as to what a book is about so they can make a more informed decision about reading it. That's what I try to do and only what I try to do - I leave the deep thoughts on method and process to others and I certainly wish them well what they do.

What I found missing in the recent discussions though (and I often find this missing) is the books themselves. It took me a little while to navigate the world of book marketing when I first started out with Bookslut so that I could request actual titles I wanted to review and not just be stuck with what is mass mailed to a million bloggers ever day. Now I receive catalogs from a dozen or more publishers (large and small) at least twice a year. The idea is that I'm supposed to mark the enclosed checklists with the titles I'm interested in, fax them in and ultimately receive those books so that I can review them. The checklist seems like the best system to me - reviewers request books they are likely to enjoy (which is good for the authors) and it saves publishers from sending out books that reviewers don't want (and thus won't read) and thus wasting the book and the shipping dollars.

If only the system worked.

I don't understand - I will never understand - why publishers go to the bother to send out catalogs when they have no interest in paying attention to reviewer requests. I wonder if authors are aware of this - of how many reviewers might like to write about their books and try to get their books publishers just won't send them out. What's really frustrating is that at the same time they send out dozens and dozens (and dozens) of books the reviewers did not request and will not read. It's just a big waste and the end result is that good books don't get read.

Case in point: Harper Collins. I've written before about how Harper Collins does not allow reviewers to request titles from the catalog and instead sends out the catalog with a promise to "send titles appropriate to your audience". (This is the Harper children's and teen catalogs - I don't know if it carries over to adult titles as well.) The end result is that I never have a clue what HC titles I will receive. From this year alone I have already missed both The Diary of Pelly D by LJ Adlington and Down to the Bone by Mayra Lazara Dole. Last year, I received sixteen titles from Harper Collins that I did not request and did not review. I requested eight titles that I have received (and have either reviewed or will review all of them). There were twelve other books that I requested that were not sent to me including I'll Ask You Three Times Are You Okay by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Tallest Tree by Sandra Belton, (a title about Paul Robeson) My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow and The Chaos King by Laura Ruby. These were all books I was specifically looking forward to and had planned to include in certain columns but the PR folks never sent them my way.

Honestly, I wonder if the books I did email HC and request after reading their catalog were sent to me because I requested them or were just part of their scattershot approach. I'm not complaining - those eight books are ones I was looking forward to, but I'm not confident at all that they came my way due to a request. The same thing happens with other publishers. Tor Books has accepted my review copy requests for the past couple of years but only sometimes sends me books I'm looking for. Between 2007 and 2008 I've received sixteen books (again) from Tor that I did not request and as they were not books I'm interested in, I did not review. I have received six books I requested but five I requested last year never arrived, including Waking Brigid by Francis Clark and Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. I recently sent a second request for Cory's book as well as Jack: Secret Histories by F. Paul Wilson, Escapement by Jay Lake and The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt.

Since I've sent the follow-up email, I've received yet another book from Tor that I never requested. Sigh.

It's really frustrating how you try to get books that you know you will connect with and thus likely review and help spread the word on but it doesn't happen. It's even more annoying when the books aren't widely reviewed elsewhere so I know how much my review might have mattered. (I realize this is not the case with Cory Doctorow's new book.) Silent Music: A Story of Baghdad by James Rumford and Keepers: Treasure Hunt Poems and Gods of Manhattan by Scott Mebus were also all requested last (from Roaring Brook and Dutton) but never arrived. They might show up eventually and I hope they do. Gods of Manhattan in particular would fit great in a column on hidden worlds I've been putting together.

I also didn't receive Chasing Tail Lights and Outside Inside Woolly Mammoths from Bloomsbury, Old Penn Station from Henry Holt, Real Food, Real Fast from Candlewick. I completely and totally understand that not every book requested is going to come my way but I have to wonder just how many reviewers period were interested in that woolly mammoth book - I might have given it some coverage it didn't receive otherwise. (And then there's FSG that sent out none of the dozen or so books I requested last year - I was lost in a PR shakeup in the department. Again, I understand how things like happen but authors need to aware that the end result is their books don't get as much coverage as they could have.)

While I understand that the internet is still not the most established aspect of the reviewing world, I also know that books get covered a lot more online then they do elsewhere. That's especially true of MG and YA titles, which I specialize in at Bookslut. I don't think authors realize how much they need to be proactive in getting their books out to interested reviewers. If the PR department is going through a shakeup the odds are good that review copy requests will be ignored. The best thing an author can do is keep track of reviewers who read their books and let them know when they have a new title due out. (That's what Bennett Madison is doing right now.)

DK sends me a catalog and review copy request list twice a year - and then never sends me a single book. Today I received an email from them asking if I wanted to review a new release. I emailed back that yes I do - which is why I requested the book a couple of months ago. We'll see if it actually shows up this time.

I raised the question last month as to just what I was hoping to accomplish with this site and even reviewing in general. There was some talk in various other sites about their intentions and while I can appreciate my own thoughts on "expanding the literary conversation", a recent afternoon of bookish talk with Jackie has persuaded me that really, there needs to be more of a concrete plan then just being part of the national discussion on books.

I mean realistically I could do that just by talking to my mother or brother on the phone, so then what's the point of the site?

I can appreciate goals of spreading the word on reading and literacy but from where I'm sitting I don't think I can contribute to those efforts. The people who find my site are already readers - heck the ones who read my column at Bookslut are clearly major bibliophiles - so it's just not my place to say that I'm helping kids read. I think it is librarians who do that job - I know that it was my elementary school librarian who went a long way towards turning me into a lifelong reader. The biggest thing she did was make me (and all the rest of us who wandered in and out of the library) aware of the newest books that she thought we might enjoy. I found books I connected with that way and after reading them I wanted to find more; soon enough, I was looking on my own. And now, thirty years later, I'm still looking.

I think it is the librarians who can get kids in the classroom or interact with them when they go butt dragging into the town library researching something for school (under extreme duress I'm sure), who really turn kids into readers. They are the front lines so to speak - the soldiers in the literary trenches. There are also all those people working in programs to get books to kids who can't afford them, or running community lending libraries or bookmobiles, that do the heavy lifting in terms of literacy. The next leg up the ladder would the be YA and kid lit booksellers who interject with the clueless relatives looking for gifts "for a nine-year old girl that loves horses or a ten-year-old boy who loves monster movies" and show them the books they need to consider buying. Get the right book and the kid will show up soon looking for more on their own - another lifelong reader is born because they got the right book at the right time.

A lot of my readers are those librarians and booksellers (as well as parents and book lovers) and so I think what I can do is let them all know about books I find that are really outstanding. Sometimes I just might be joining the chorus but there are also times when I can tell my readers about a book they have likely never heard of. That's how I can contribute to the bookish world - by getting a great author some new readers. It might not be saving civilization as we know it, but it's one more step in the battle for a larger literate world and I'm happy to do my part.

On that note, let me expand on my brief note the other day about Molly Gloss' The Hearts of Horses. This is an adult title but it is perfect -absolutely perfect - for high school horse lovers. Set during WWI in Oregon ranch country, it follows 19 year old Martha who has left home in an effort to support herself through breaking horses. She does not follow the widely held rough (and violent) techniques of the day and is more of a "horse whisperer". Gloss' detail on what Martha does and how she connects with the horses is fascinating, but that is only one small part of the novel (and don't worry that it gets bogged down in horse training detail - that is not the case at all). The real draw here is the way that Gloss shows Martha slowly making friends with the different families she works for and how they become part of her life and she part of theirs. There is so much of just living here - of families struggling against poverty and racism (it is WWI so being German is not such a great thing), of cruelty and callousness, of bad love, good love and doomed love. It's just a stellar look at what might be considered small lives but ultimately is everything about the human condition that a reader could want.

The moment for me though - the moment when I was blown away - comes when one of the characters who is dying hard of cancer has a sudden moment of clarity. Here is the passage:

"I couldn't sleep," she said, "so I've been knitting."

"You're crying. Why are you crying?" He continued to look at her in frowning bewilderment. "Something's wrong. I feel it. What's happening? Tell me what is wrong?"

There was such vehemence in his voice, intensity in his face, that it frightened her. What he was asking was ambiguous, undefined, but she thought she knew what it was. "I couldn't sleep," she said with a kind of desperation and then, "You're dying. Do you remember?"

He looked at her in stunned silence. "I'm dying?" His eyes welled with tears. "Why am I dying?"

"Oh Tom, you have a cancer." She began to cry in earnest, and his face twisted into grief. He came blindly across the room to her and knelt at her chair, took her into his arms in a fierce grasp, and they clung together crying. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, with his mouth in his wife's tangled hair.

This passage just slayed me, pure and simple because I have been there, because my father had that moment right before he died where he forgot and I had to tell him and it is a moment in my life of such complete sadness and despair; a day I can't forget, a look on his face that is still with me.

And Molly Gloss nailed it - she nailed all the sorrow of that moment like she had been there herself. I'm in awe of how beautifully she wrote about dying, just as I'm in awe of all the other gorgeous writing she packs into her book.

So, I heartily recommend The Hearts of Horses for readers of around the 14-15 and older age group (a small bit of sex at the end, but very carefully written). It is for those who have a love for things western or horses, or those who love big sweeping stories about families and people and teenage girls with pluck. It will likely resonate most strongly with girls, due to Martha being front and center, but any boy with an interest in horses will love it as well. A formal review will appear in next month's column, and I hope many of you will give it a read.

After my recent post on trying to better navigate the lit blogosphere world in a matter that is significant to the world at large, Jen Robinson followed up with her own thoughts on blogging about children's books which prompted many comments and Kelly Herold coincidentally unveiled a new design for Big A little a and acknowledged that she has become overwhelmed at late with blogging duties and pulled back in several areas establishing some new rules for how she will run her site. Based on the comments at her site, it is clear a lot of people have been rethinking the time they spend on the web and reading and writing about all those review copies.

I am, as they say, not alone.

One thing I realized from reading everyone else's thoughts is that I clearly started Chasing Ray for different reasons from many other bloggers. Through Eclectica and Bookslut I already had a place to review books, but I wanted to write in a more casual way about literature and also wanted to cover other subjects like my own writing. Most importantly though, I wanted to be able to interact with other writers and readers. I wanted to be part of a literary conversation - any literary conversation - and staking a place for myself in the lit blogosphere seemed like the best (and relatively easiest) way to do that.

Most importantly of all though, I am a writer and I know how hard it is for any writer (other than the super big names) to gain any sort of publicity. It makes perfect sense to me that if/when my Alaska books ever get published (if/when, if/when, if/when), I have a jump on the average debut author by already being known a bit online. Any extra word of mouth helps and at the risk of sounding like a calculating creature, I want to do now what I can to make sure my name is out there later, if my novel or memoir do get their moments in print. I need to be here to accomplish that goal and if I'm going to be here, then I want to do it under my own terms, and in as big a way as I personally can.

The question of course - the big question - is just what that means. What do I have to do here in this space to be satisfied with it? And what do my readers want - or should they fairly be allowed to expect - from me? And do I care about anyone else's expectations? Do I worry about keeping readers coming back here everyday (Mon - Fri)? Should any of us even think about our readers that much?

I mean at the end of the day - what the heck are we all doing this blogging for?

(Oh good God - maybe this is a mid life crisis after all.... :)

Here's what I've come up with in two days of pondering: I want to be part of a big literary conversation. I think one of the reasons we are struggling so much in this country right now is that we don't think or talk about big ideas enough - in many cases it doesn't even occur to us to have big ideas. What gets drilled in our heads from the time we can add and subtract is that we need to get a job that makes good money so we can be a success. The definition of "good money" is different depending on whatever socio-economic background we hail from, but pretty much it is all about the job. Except that strategy is not working. We go to school, graduate, get working, get a place of your own, a family, a lot of bills, a lot of frustrations, a lot of disappointments that you never seem to have enough money for all things you want and then - then you just end up sad and tired and depressed.

One of the things Kelly mentioned in my comments the other day was that Americans don't talk enough about things like racism and war and poverty and I agree with her. I think the reason why though is because we are all too busy with the many mundane qualities of our lives - with the shopping and errands and mowing the big lawn and answering the email and don't even get me started on dragging the kids all over the place and we have no freaking time to worry about what we foolishly hope our elected officials will deal with for us. We never think about big ideas because big ideas are not sold as significant parts of our lives. What we talk about mostly is work because we are taught all of our lives that work is what matters. I can't help but think that if literature and art and natural history and anthropology and other "idea" subjects were valued as much as "getting a job" then it would occur to us to ask big questions or look for big answers in all areas of our lives. We have all fallen for the lure of the quick dollar and it is showing in our general intellectual slump. We don't know what to ask anymore; we don't even know how to ask.

Literary conversations are all about asking questions though and I want to encourage that kind of behavior; I want to get us all asking more about about who we are and who we want to be and just what the heck we are doing with our lives. And it wouldn't hurt if we took those questions to the next level and turned out sights on Washington. Those people could use some hard questions and it's our fault that not enough people have been asking them.

So the nuts and bolts of what I want to do means that I need to be here, front and center, with thoughts on books and authors and just how great reading can be. More importantly, I need to bring to the attention of others books that they are missing, something I've already tried to do to a certain degree but will try even harder in the future. I'm going to dodge internet fights and fits as often as I can (although it is impossible to always rise above it all) and focus on engaging others in the conversation. Part of why I think the multi blog efforts like the Summer Blog Blast Tour and the upcoming (ten days) Winter Blog Blast Tour, and Recommendations From Under the Radar are so important is that they bring together so many different voices on so many different books. What I would love is to get more librarians involved in knowing about the SBBT and WBBT so our efforts to spread the words on great authors could reach more people. I'm working on that right now, but I'm also recommitted to those multi blog efforts. I also plan to add one more - "Curiosities and Obsessions" so we have a week long effort to write about subjects that intrigue us. I think it's a way to let people know about books on things they might not know about and maybe get them curious as well. I love curious readers - I think they are the best kind and any way to encourage that is something I want to be part of. So four big planned multi blog efforts every year and maybe some fun things in between as well, but the four big ones are enough to keep me grounded in my effort to make a difference and also to give my readers something to count on - something they know they can show up here to find out about and hopefully learn from

Beyond that, it has always been Jenny D and Gwenda who have been my favorite literary blogs to visit and I plan to keep on writing in ways I learned from them. Jenny writes long entries on reading and research and sometimes even her goal to engage in sports large and small (way more fun to read about then I thought they would be) and Gwenda keeps her pulse on the happenings in various corners of the lit blogosphere I would otherwise be missing while also writing reviews on titles I always seem to have missed and explaining what it is like to be a writer who works everyday at writing well. They are there for me nearly everyday, and so I'll be here too, keeping up my end of the conversation.

And finally, one thing that I have seen come up in various places is the pressure brought on by review copies. For what it is worth, in 2007 I have received 663 books for review. (I keep a small database so I can track how many I review - just for my own interest.) It is not physically possible for someone to read that amount of books let alone review them. I don't ask for the majority of them - they show on their own. I'll write more later on how I handle the books (the nuts and bolts of piles and donations) but all of you who are overwhelmed need to consider that you allow yourselves to be overwhelmed. Don't take that the wrong way - when I started reviewing I was driven nearly mad trying to keep up as well. And then I realized, after more than three years of doing this, that it's not my job to write on every book in the universe and it's not my job to make publicists happy. They are doing their jobs by sending the books to me - they are trying to get the word out. From there, I decide what I will write about. I make the choice what I will read. No one should feel like they have to even read a book that shows up for review, let alone write about it. The cool thing though is that we all have different taste so every book I pass up, is certainly reviewed (and loved) by someone else who also received a copy. I'm just one link in a huge chain to get readers interested in a book and if I don't review it I need not worry that a book will "die".

I'm not the end of the world for authors - I'm just another small town stop on the way. I'll review what I can and feel good about those but I won't ever feel bad about not reviewing a book. That's just a distraction I can't allow myself to fall victim to, not when there are so many positive things I can be doing for books instead.

Back here Monday - same Bat Time - same Bat Channel...................

Okay, this begins with a new book from Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls. Written for ages ten and up, it follows two girls (ages 11 and 12) in the early 1970s who become friends as they struggle with troubling family situations (one has parents in the death throes of a bad marriage, the other has a missing mother who left the family five years before). While the one girl does imagine her missing mother has become a fox (she knows this is a mind game to help deal with her life), the book is not a fantasy nor does it contain any fantastic elements. Sarah and Joan become friends, write a story that wins a contest, get into a writing workshop for kids over the summer and confront some truths about themselves and the people they love. Lots of growing up all around and as someone who has read the book, I can tell you it is very well written and young girls are going to love it. But this isn't about what I think; it's about a lot of other people.

Paul Kincaid reviewed the book for SF Site, probably because Murphy is a Nebula award winning writer who is clearly well known in SFF circles. His review (even he refers to it as "not one of my best reviews.." at his own lj) is not particularly insightful and it is safe to say he didn't really like the book. Jenn (aka Literaticat) took issue with the review and wrote a response at her LJ. (As most of you know, Jenn runs "Not Your Mother's Bookclub" and knows her books for kids, so to say her response is passionate is an understatement.) Gwenda picked up on the response and got many comments at her site, mostly about adults reviewing kid's books and if there is a difference between reviewing an adult book and a kid book and all that. (When I say "kid" book I mean MG or YA.)

Then Niall picked it up at his site and got way more comments as he asked some pointed questions about the difference between reviewing MG and YA fiction (Wild Girls is for age 10 and up which makes it MG, Kincaid referred to it as YA, Jenn made a point of saying he should know the difference) and adult vs YA fiction. Paul Kincaid found out all of this was going on from Niall's site and so he wrote about it at his LJ and everyone started having a party over there about YA, MG, American vs British kid books and on and on an on (and on....)

If nothing else, lots of folks now know that Pat Murphy has a new book coming out!

First, for those few who might still be wondering, there are some differences in MG and YA as far as content, etc. The easiest way to explain would be to consider the differences between a 10 year old and 16 year old - so not much in the way of swearing or sex in the MG books and little violence.

My ARC of Wild Girls labels the book as for ten and up or Grade 5 and up and from reading it (something that I should point out very very few of the commenters at all the above sites have done), it seems to be directed squarely at the older elementary school/middle school set (so the 10-13 year olds for you British readers). I'll go further and say this is really a book for 10-13 year old girls. That doesn't mean boys won't read it (or enjoy it) but when you combine two young female protagonists who turn to writing stories and journals to sort out their feelings about life well - that is very much a girl book (as any former bookish preteen female will tell you). But again - THIS DOES NOT MEAN a boy could not read it or a man could not review it. I'm just pointing out who will be primarily reading it, and that's something you have to think about when reviewing a book for kids. (You can't judge a book for a ten year old as to whether or not a 40 year old likes it, plain and simple. Does it still have to be well written well yes, of course, but what a ten year old wants to read about is not what a 40 year old wants to read about and you have to think about that when reviewing kid books. You just have to, period.)

But aside from all this MG vs YA stuff, my issue with Paul's review is more that he clearly didn't think much of the book - and I don't mean that he wrote a negative review, I mean he didn't think much about this book at all. Consider this sentence:

"This is writing reduced to a simple lesson in life, light, appealing and entertaining but very definitely aimed at a younger audience by removing any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects."

Well, it is aimed at a younger audience (age 10 and up) so I don't understand why the fact that it does that should be framed as a criticism. Maybe he didn't mean it as a criticism but that is how it seemed to come across. More importantly, he says no "doubts, hesitation or darker aspects" are in the book and yet I found Murphy's descriptions of the two families to be quite dark - specifically the tension she writes about in Joan's family. Here's an example:

My mother and father did not like one another much. Dinner was just about the only time they sat down together. A vague sense of tension always hung over the table, centering on my father. He was always angry - not about anything in particular, but about everything, all the time. But he pretended he wasn't angry. He was always joking but the jokes weren't very funny.

That's on page 13 and the tension in that house builds as the story progresses. Murphy does a great job of showing how that sort of atmosphere works on kids trapped in the middle, how siblings will turn on each other to deflect negative attention, how kids must take sides between parents, how you try to pretend you don't know what's going on even when you do, how everyone lies and pretends it's all okay. This is real dark - the kind of dark that a lot kids can identify with. And even though it doesn't seem bad (no one is getting raped or beaten or left on the side of the road so it can't be really bad, can it?), it is hard and it lives in you forever.

Trust me - you never forget all that time spent pretending to be part of a happy family.

Paul also did not see the book as subtle or complex, yet I thought by writing about the breakup of a family - and taking the time to make every single family member a fully fleshed out character - Murphy was doing something both unusual and very complex here. She walks a tightrope of showing how a dying marriage looks to the children while still keeping the adults real. Neither the father or mother is a monster and although the father at first seems to be the fall guy, Murphy goes out of her way to humanize him (more than once). Readers might not agree with him or what he does, but they will understand his motivations just as Joan eventually does. That's not an easy thing to do in a book - for adults or kids - and Murphy does it very well. So I think she has crafted a complex story. It's not complex in terms of plot but when it comes to characterization and emotion - well yeah, I think she has done some fine work.

Paul also states that the girls are isolated, and that Sarah's father (a "successful" SF writer) "pretty well leaves Fox [that's Sarah's nickname] to get on with her life the way she wants" and their mutual isolation draws the girls together. Actually, that's not true. First, Murphy makes it clear that Sarah's father is not a successful writer - he's a paid one, but the house they live in was willed to them and the paint is peeling, the linoleum cracked, etc. Joan's mother mentions giving some of Joan's clothes to Sarah as hers are torn. This isn't a major plot issue but it makes me think Paul gave the book only a cursory look, something that his comments on isolation further support. When some bigger boys find the girls in the woods and threaten them, it is Sarah's father who quickly comes to the rescue - he knows where she is and is not far away. And while neither girl is popular in school (especially Sarah), Joan's neighbor Cindy easily befriends her and she joins the Girl Scouts (at her mother's urging, but she makes a point of saying she enjoys their company). Further, every step of the way in the book the girls have a parent (and later Joan's brother) along with them. I don't think it was deep seeded issues of isolation that drew them together; Sarah is angry over her mother leaving and very shy and Joan is a new kid in town. They make friends because they find each other one day and then they realize they like each other. It's that simple and when they find a mutual joy in creating stories, the friendship is cemented.

By missing all this, by reading it wrong, I think a lot was lost in the review.

Finally, Paul has this comment: "The Wild Girls is clearly written and very readable, but in its praise of writing as a way of coping with whatever the world may throw at you it feels somewhat simplistic."

See that's where I really felt the split between an adult male and a preteen girl. Young girls in particular love to write. They write bad poems, bad stories, notes in class and many many overly dramatic diary entries. Writing is a big deal to them as an age group and it does help in all kinds of ways. In this case, I didn't think that learning to be better writers solved all their problems - the problems were being solved (one way or another) by the adults. What Sarah and Joan had to do was learn how to be brave enough to see their parents as people and not just parents and to share their own thoughts and concerns about the decisions those parents were making. They did this not only through the writing lessons but also through the friendships they made in the workshop. There were no easy endings in this book; there was just learning how to live with their families and the world around them. In that respect, Murphy showed how writing out your feelings can help and I think that is true and, more importantly, real to the age group reading this book.

What I couldn't help but wonder about this review is if maybe Paul was comparing Wild Girls too much to some of Murphy's earlier titles and thus found it wanting in "darkness" or some adult themes she has addressed elsewhere. This is when I begin to think that maybe he came looking for something in this book that he did not find and was disappointed about that - thus having preconceived ideas about what the book should be and not judging it on its own merits.

Honestly I review books for kids all year and anyone who thinks it is easy for an adult to do - or that it is the same as reviewing an adult book - is wrong. When you read a book written for adults you are the audience for that book and you can judge it directly on your own response to it (like it/don't like it/bored by it, etc.) But an adult reading a book written for children (or teens) has to think (to a certain degree) like a kid when reading the book. Yes, I know if it is great it will be great regardless of the age of the reader but I'm sorry - by and large what is great to a 10 year old is not even good to many adults. That's because we are interested in different things. It's like me trying to get my step father to read the latest SF title I can't put down. If it has rockets in it and it's not nonfiction then he thinks it's garbage, plain and simple.

Again, does that mean that writing for children can be of poor or lesser quality? No - of course not. But the writing that an adult would love is not going to appeal to most children (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, on and on and on). If a child reviewed The Great Gatsby and said there was too much symbolism in the story and it was unclear, would we all agree or say a child couldn't understand the significance of that symbolism? Audience matters, that is why it is so frustrating when a non genre reviewer reads a SF novel and rakes it over the coals - or when all those reviewers said Harry Potter was too overwritten. I think JK Rowling knew her audience and she wrote the way they wanted to read.

And those books are going to last forever, whether everyone agrees they deserve to or not.

Niall notes in his post that Jenn was saying Wild Girls was good, full stop - not just as a kid book. And he said that if she's saying that, then you have to judge it on the same merits as an adult book (thus you can't consider the audience). (He used Octavian Nothing as an example here and I have to tell you - I didn't like that book. But I do get his point.) Jenn chimed in later in the comments and said yep, it is good - full stop. As for me, I don't pick year's best but I will say that this is a book I would press on all the 9-10 (and up) bookish type kids I know (all of whom are girls I'm afraid). It does not beat say, Jo Walton's Ha'penny or Nicholas Christopher's The Bestiary or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, of Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl all of which I read this year. But I do think it is one of the best books I've read recently and I'm looking forward to reviewing it next month in my column. Which brings me around to the one thing that is clear to me in all this:

You can't phone in a review on the internet.

I think Paul Kincaid didn't like The Wild Girls all that much and wrote a short review that is a somewhat inaccurate synopsis of the book and also just rather dull. It's not about the review being positive or negative, it's about it not being a worthy review. This doesn't make him a bad reviewer (please don't think I'm saying that), it just means in this case he didn't give the book the attention someone who felt strongly about it would have. And then someone who is passionate about the book (that would be Jenn) jumped on him for it and then everybody else jumped on both of them over issues that had less to do with the book and more about who can review it - or should review it. I know it is hard to be bright and insightful and witty in all this review writing but if I can't contribute something (one way or the other) about a book - if I just don't care about it enough to do that level of work - then I don't write about it. And maybe Paul should have skipped this one and waited for a book he does care about.

As for me, I liked it for many many reasons, some of which have to do with me once being an 11 year old girl who wrote a lot stories and found that writing could change my world.

Sometimes, things do just work out that way.

Liz forwarded me a link to a recent post on ethics in book reviewing (from an anonymous reviewer of course) and we have been discussing it the past few days via email. The first thing I did after reading the post was go back over the reports on the recent NBCC panel at BEA on this very subject and see just where the opinions expressed in this other post diverged from those of several very prominent (and identifiable) reviewers. (Ed provided a very comprehensive round up of the NBCC panel in three parts, here, here and here.)

I'll let you be the judge but I like the Christopher's Hitchens comment Ed mentioned:

Hitch quibbled with the “permanent affectation of integrity,” because he pointed that you could diagram cross-hatchets of blurbs and easily see how everyone was connected to each other.

The question is can a person review a book if they are friends, on any level, with the author? In the post I linked to above the unnamed reviewer not only would say "no" to that question, he/she even goes several steps further:

Major papers in the U.S. have an iron-clad policy: reviewers can't meet the authors they review.

Can you meet them at a book signing? Can you pass them in a hallway? Can you be invited to the same literary function? As it turns out, apparently - hell no.

A lot of book reviewers are also writers, so we're constantly skirting conflict-of-interest issues. Causes a lot of strange silences at parties, and the occasional ducking-into-the-bathroom. Recently, I attended a book party when I probably shouldn't have. The publicist grabbed me by the arm (ouch! again) and dragged me over to an author. Unfortunately, I was reviewing his book for a major magazine. I felt I had to tell my editor. My editor felt he had to pull the review. (He was kind enough to still pay me. A lot of editors wouldn't do that.) If you sense a nervous, slightly school-marmish tone here, it's because when a publicist or author slips up, the reviewer may lose a paycheck. I don't know if I'll ever be able to review for that magazine again—-that's a chunk of change, and a bit o' prestige, that I've lost.

I'm really puzzled by this because it smacks of paranoia. A meeting at a party? "Hi, how are you? I'm a reviewer who is reviewing your current book but I haven't even read it yet so let's not talk about it okay? Let's talk about the Red Sox!!" Can you talk about anything other than THE book? Can you talk kids or weather or movies? Can you talk about the Russian Revolution or Iraq? Do we have to assume that anything a writer says - on any subject at all - is going to influence a reviewer's opinion of the their book?

Are reviewers really that easily swayed?

After this "hiding in the bathroom at parties bombshell" the reviewing piece goes downhill. How do you get a book reviewed? "Write a good book." Gee - that's helpful. All the people planning to write bad books are freaking out right now. But it still made me think. Are writers and reviewers forbidden to have contact between each other on any level at all? Wow - just wow.

To be honest, I kind of fudged things a bit with the title to this post - Cecil Castellucci, who I interviewed this month in Bookslut, and reviewed her first two books (here and here), is a friend in that very 21st century sort of way. We have never met and never spoken, but we have emailed many many times on topics varying from Superman to Logan's Run and I certainly consider her a friend in the same way as Gwenda or Jenny D. or Kelly and Jen (and on and on and on). My initial contact with Cecil was after I reviewed her first book. I send emails to all the authors and illustrators I review as a courtesy - because I know that I would like to know if there was a review up of my work. The note is no longer than a single sentence with a link and usually I just get a quick "thank you" in reply. Cecil didn't have many reviews in the beginning though so mine stood out and quite frankly we hit it off really quickly. (This makes perfect sense if you know me and have read Boy Proof.) We continued to email and comment on each other's sites in the months that followed and I requested and reviewed her second book without a second thought. I did the same for her recent titles as well.

Keep in mind though, I did this because I loved her first book and I wanted to see what she would do next. Since then, everything she has written has impressed me more than the last so I continue to review her work out of acute admiration for her talent.

I never thought I was doing something unethical through this contact (or similar contact with authors like Justine Larbalestier or Bennett Madison or most recently Nicola Griffith). I am a reader and a writer; I live, sleep and breathe books. The chance to exchange correspondence with writers - to have "conversations" with them about their books is very important to me. It's one of the best things that has come out of this site and my reviewing work.

But, does emailing about writing with any of these authors make it impossible for me to impartially review their work?

It's an interesting issue. I would never review a book by a family member or close friend ("Close friend" is not someone I sat next to in elementary school and haven't seen since 1978) but someone who I have no intimate personal attachment to - someone who doesn't know the name of my child or what my house looks like or could even explain what I do for a living? Can I really feel compelled to write nice things about their work because we both like comic books? It's kind of like saying that the waitress who pours your juice at the local cafe could influence you, or your kid's soccer coach, or the guy at the local nursery who spent a half hour talking about ferns.

Really, must we live in a literary bubble in order to maintain our integrity?

if that's the price this unnamed unknown reviewer happily pays then good for him or her but I won't have it. For the record I have been asked by people I know to review their books and I have said no. Sometimes because they are too close and sometimes because the book just isn't for me. The point there is that liking Cecil or not, I wouldn't review her books if I didn't like her writing.

See there is the difference - separate the person from their writing.

Really though, this is all just an intellectual argument for me. I exchange emails with many writers, some of whom have written books that I review (and might review again in the future). Again, it all comes down to trust. I have to think that my readers know me well enough by now to trust that my opinion is always and only about the book. That is the way that I inhabit the literary world - it's the way I need to inhabit the literary world. Someone else can write reviews for the major (also unnamed) newspapers. I'll be too busy hanging out with authors, reading good books and writing my heart out to miss anything.

In the midst of all the fighting about how lit blogs were going to tear down the literary universe before print reviewers had a chance to save it (see posts here and here for more than you ever wanted to know about that) I realized that most print reviewers had very little idea of what goes on in the lit blogosphere. There were the absolutely crazy things like comparing lit bloggers to maggots, or assigning us all to basements in Terre Haute (and the fun just keeps coming with the recent Library Journal column that suggests we are all disturbed people with 18 cats) but more often than not I kept reading that lit bloggers didn't do enough critical writing or did too much linking or wrote reviews that were too short (or too long) and most commonly that none of us had qualified "experience". (Although to date no one has been able to explain just what the academic or professional requirements are to be a book reviewer.)

What everyone seemed to be missing is that the lit blogosphere (and I mean the functioning portions of it - the people that write five days a week on multiple subjects and are dedicated to publishing good solid content) works best when taken as a whole - when a viewer can build their own list of sites that includes blogs that publish literary criticism, blogs that provide assorted literary links, blogs that interview authors frequently and blogs that focus on the publishing industry. (Keeping in mind of course that most of the blogs I've linked to do almost all of these things on any given day.) (Jenny D.'s being the perfect example of this.)

In other words, you can't visit my site on any single day and think that you know what it's all about; Chasing Ray does not work that way, and neither do most sites in the lit blogosphere.

Beyond all that though, one glaring omission from the blogs and print reviewers debate was the significant contribution that the kidlitosphere makes to the national literary conversation. Everyone who reads book reviews knows that children's books do not receive the same attention as titles for adult readers and everyone who has children knows how frustrating it can be to find good books for their kids. We rely heavily on recommendations from friends, the help of librarians and the occasional print review. What we really want to know though, is where to find a list of good dinosaur books for a five-year old, or great historical mysteries for a 12-year old (or a unique summer reading list for teenage girls!)

We want specifics, and we would like it sooner rather than later.

This is the kind of information that is living and breathing in the kidlitosphere everyday, as librarians, booksellers, reviewers, writers, parents and fans of the young adult, middle grade and picture book genres read, review and recommend title after title after title. We do it on a scale that is not happening in print publications and because we do it real time, because Leila is reading a book that I'm reading and Kelly is thinking about reading and Gwenda is planning to read then we are all commenting at each other's blogs about what we liked or didn't like or were surprised by. We tell you who the book might work for ("recommended for fans of XXX") and what you should watch out for ("sexual content puts this title in the high school range") and we look off the beaten path - all the time. T

I had thought that after the recent "maggot" entry at the Critical Mass blog, there would be no more discussion of lit blogs vs newspaper reviewers. I mean really, did we need to go any lower than this:

Seriously, though, blogs are kind of like parasitic microorganisms which feed off of a primary host. For the sake of this discussion, the host is clearly print media. Some are the good bacteria and some are transient and viral. Or maybe I can upgrade blogs to the status of some sort of interstitial or synovial fluid, buffering the vital organs of the media (newspaper, television, radio, the Internet)? But, c’mon, if newspapers are dying, then blogs are the maggots come to feast upon their corpses.

I was both annoyed and puzzled over why the NBCC would post something like this. Then the comments started rolling in where several people asked just why such an inflammatory post was allowed and this is what Rebecca Skloot, Critical Mass webmistress, had to say in a respone to comments asking this very same thing:

The NBCC actually doesn't invite anyone to post here. Several posts are sent unsolicited. Many are invited by one individual blogger or another, but the rest of the blogging committee generally doesn't know who's posting what until we read it on the blog like everyone else. Regardless of who posts, what they say, or who invited them, there truly is no connection between any statements on this blog and the NBCC as an organization (or even all the bloggers who post here).

I understand it's easy to make the assumption that posts here somehow represent the NBCC or all Critical Mass bloggers, but that's simply not the case (which is why I'm constantly posting comments reminding people otherwise).

There is a disclaimer posted on the site to this effect (a standard "the posts don't reflect NBCC blah blah blah") but really - I'm just floored by this. On a site that proudly bills itself as "the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors", includes a button for donations to the NBCC and is pretty much the center point for the whole NBCC launched "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing", what we find out is that really - any post from anyone can show up here.

This makes no sense to me.

I'm not associate with any organization that carries the level of prestige that the NBCC does, and yet I don't let anyone send in an unsolicited post and blindly post it without any concern for its content. And yes, I understand that Critical Mass is a group blog, but I don't see why that makes a difference. In fact to me that just means that the group should be more careful about what their standards and mission are before they let posts go out the door. It seems very irresponsible and dangerously close to high school to say that yes, we are all members of the NBCC, we created this blog post about "...literary criticism, publishing, writing, and all things NBCC related. " but what we have no control over what shows up here and if somebody decides to refer to other folks as maggots, well, really -

Stuff happens. (Oh - I was corrected later that Shannon Byrne who wrote that lovely didn't refer to anyone as a maggot. That's right, she referred to blogs as maggots. I guess bloggers are...mothers of maggots?)

For the record, it was Jane Ciabattari who is listed as the person who posted Byrne's rant. She is VP of membership for the NBCC. I don't know if it should bother me that she read Byrne's post and put it up anyway or posted without reading. Either way, it seems that by posting there has to be some level of NBCC approval for Byrne's thoughts, and to suggest otherwise is really a bit silly at this point.

In an attempt to clarify all this, Rebecca Skloot posted on Friday just how Critical Mass works:

To clarify some confusion. I get many angry emails from readers about some post or another on the blog. Those emails and many comments on the blog make it clear, people believe things posted here represent the views of the NBCC, and every blogger who posts here. That's simply not true. As it says on the left margin of the blog (and as I've posted in many comments), all opinions posted here belong to each individual post's author. They're not those of the NBCC or the Critical Mass bloggers as a whole.

Readers often assume that each poster has been chosen and vetted by the NBCC or its board to represent its views. Not true: The NBCC doesn't invite anyone to post here. Some posts are unsolicited. Many are invited by one individual blogger or another, but the rest of the blogging committee (myself included) often doesn't know who's posting what until we read it on the blog like everyone else.

The NBCC is a large organization with lots of opinions. This blog is simply a venue for many of those opinions, and the opinions of others in the industry.

So there you go. Anyone can post at Critical Mass, as long as they know someone who knows someone. And the NBCC takes no responsibility for what shows up. But that just isn't good enough for me - and it doesn't explain the many other posts and interviews that have shown up at Critical Mass that always seem to drag the competition between newspaper book reviews and lit blogs into the conversation. To wit:

In the Q&A with fiction writer Sheila Kohler we have this lovely exchange:

Q. Does your work get reviewed/discussed much on literary blogs? If so, how do those reviews compare with print reviews of your books?

A.Occasionally someone may mention my books in a blog. I believe the dangers of this indiscriminate reporting on books is that people who have no knowledge of literature can air their views as though they were of value and may influence readers. Critics may not always be right, of course, but at least they have read and studied literature, the great books, and have some outside knowledge to refer to when critiquing our work.

We also have Howard Zinn being asked about newspapers pointing to the web for reviews, Adam Hothschild saying young reviewers need newspapers to break into the business (as opposed to "Personal blogs, unedited Wikipedia entries and MySpace pages..."), Gayle Brandeis explaining that online reviews make her read books less (?) and book editor Karen Long saying that "...a number of bloggers are borderline gleeful..." over the demise of newspapers and helpfully pointing out that the Book Babes "will never be in a position to tell you, as Kathy Englehart did two weeks ago, which children's books to read with your kids before visiting the Monet exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art.”

Gee Karen, thanks for that tip. I'm sure the Book Babes are where I would have started for recommendations on just that subject.

What's missing in all these nicely written, artfully composed messages about the romance of ink stained fingers, breakfast with the book review section of the paper and the lure of reading newspaper reviews in the tub (and yes - that's all to be found at Critical Mass) is any decent, inciteful, meaningful discussion on the many many many other ways in which discussions about books are taking place in America.

I mean really - you don't need a computer to get a subscription to Tin House.

There was a good post at Critical Mass on just this subject last week - the first post I have seen there on literary magazines (or other non newspaper but still print reviews). Subscriptions to literary magazines are not expensive and in fact much cheaper than the newspaper (if you want to make that comparison). And there are literary magazines for all kinds of people - people who love sports, people looking for regional work, people more interested in interviews then fiction, and on and on. The one thing they pretty much all have in common is enormously healthy and well written book review sections.

And lots of people do read them - even people who don't have MFAs.

Beyond the lit mags though, there are a ton of general interest magazines that review books and they haven't entered into the big discussion on reviewing at all. You have Outside, Vanity Fair, O (of course), Smithsonian, The New Yorker and on and on. Even Vogue and Elle include book reviews and please - don't anyone get on their high horse about what kind of books are included in certain magazines. Do they tailor to their readership? Yes- of course. But honestly, you would be hard pressed to find the kind of nonfiction converage for adventure and exploration titles that Outside does over at the NYT. And both Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm originated at that magazine as articles (just to name a few).

In other words - you don't have to get ink on your fingers to find great book discussions.

There has been a lot of discussion all over the place about the NBCC's big petition drive to save the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's book review section. The importance of print book reviews in general to our culture has become the cause at the NBCC and there have been spinoff columns and blog posts all over the place about why newspaper book review sections must be saved.

I've already discussed the internet vs print conflict that came out of this, but there's something else that occurred to me today as I was reading a bizarre piece on the subject in the Orlando Sentinel (which is the newspaper the Mom and Stepdad read everyday btw). Here's how Kathleen Parker opens her column to save book reviewing:

People who read books are different from other people. They're smarter for one thing. They're more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read. They like to carry the words around with them -- tote them on vacation, take them on train rides and then, most heavenly of all, to bed.

They're also a dying breed. And newspapers, apparent signatories to a suicide pact, are playing "Taps."

What a twit. And her editor, who approved this column (titled "America's Death March Toward Illiteracy") is a twit as well. People who read books are smarter than those who do not? So people who just read newspapers or magazines are stupid? Does she really mean this? And what about people who don't have time to read books - the ones who are working so hard fixing cars, repairing electrical grids and - I don't know - designing the next space shuttle? If you read technical manuals that are not reviewed in a newspaper are you stupid compared to folks who spend their evenings reading literary fiction?

We are in a world now where we make blanket statements that book people are smart people?

I mean really - this is who we have championing the cause of book reviews? We need to have a book review section so the smart people can find out more titles that will make them smarter? I thought the whole thing could not possibly be any more elitest until I heard the lady call in from Scottsdale, AZ today on NPR and tell NBCC president John Freeman that she would die without the NYT's Sunday Book Review. She lives, she said, "in an intellectual wasteland". One wonders how she knew enough to find NPR on her radio. Amazing how they still have it out in the sticks.

Poor sad smart lady, with all those hicks.

Look, I'm fine with book reviews in newspapers - honestly my problem with newpapers for the past few years has involved their collective inability to pursue hard stories concerning the Iraq War, not if Thomas Pynchon is getting his 800th review. But yes, book reviewing is great and good and I'm all for positive discussion of books. But newspaper book review coverage really what's keeping America literate? Is this the cause that must be embraced and written about by the country's top critics and all those earnest authors who are posting at the NBCC?

Is this the big important battle we should be paying attention to?

No. Not by a long shot.

Why aren't we all up in arms about public libraries? We read the stories about Jackson County, Oregon and feel bad - but those libraries closed anyway last month and now it's up to the residents to raise the money on their own to get them open again. And as for the Gulf Coast - do I even need to remind everyone what a mess the Gulf Coast library systems are still in? Twenty libraries in Louisiana alone are still closed from Katrina - still closed 18 months later. Has the NBCC been rallying the troops to speed up the process to get those buildings rebuilt, repaired and reopened?

What about funding for emergency book mobiles? What about increasing the hours in school libraries for the communities to use? I don't know - what about coming up with ideas to help the community get more access to books? And what about the poor kids who spend time in the juvenile justice system in the city of New Orleans? Not a library to be found in those detention centers - except the ones that volunteers are putting together on their own.

Why aren't there letter writing campaings in support of libraries across America? Shouldn't there be at least a bookmobile in every rural community and inner city neighborhood? Shoudln't we be striving to make sure every Headstart Program has a library, every Girls and Boys Club? Why is the literary community more concerned about reviewing books then making sure that books get to the people who have the lowest access to them? On NPR John Freeman made a point of saying that while lit blogs are a good thing, not everyone has a computer. He suggested that newspapers are the choice of the people who can't get to computers (can't afford them basically). So I guess newspaper book reviewers are apparently reviewing for the "masses". But if you can't get the damn books then what does the review matter?

I grew up in a house without a lot of money. I honestly can't remember if we got the local newspaper when I was young but I do remember the bookmobile coming by when I was very small (under 5) and going to the library a couple of years later. We went to the library all the time when I was growing up - every week. Between my parents (who both loved to read) the Eau Gallie Public Library (which looks nothing like it did when I was a kid) and the Creel Elementary School library I became a lifelong book lover. I chose books based on recommendations from the librarians, from posters and signs they put up on the walls, from recommendations from family and friends (Little Women from my Aunt Irene, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from my grandmother) and from pulling them off the shelves. The library was the only way I was going to get all the books I wanted though - the only shot my family had at reading to our heart's content.

We got along just fine without newspaper book reviews; I don't know what we would have done without unlimited free access to books.

I do enjoy a good book review and I wish there was money enough to support their inclusion in every major newspaper in America. But I know - I know - that they are not the center of American literacy or the lynchpin upon which our culture is built. That's the public library system folks and that is where the battle for the books should be fought.

I was thinking about writing a post that would respond to the things Michael Dirda had to say about bloggers in his post at Critical Mass concerning the demise of newspaper book review section. The post is supposed to be about the importance of newspaper book sections, something Critical Mass (the Nat Book Critics blog) is getting lots of writers and critics to weigh in on. Here's part of Dirda's statement:

Every blogger wants to write a book. In fact, the dirty little secret of the internet is "Littera scripta manet"--the written word survives. A book is real, whereas cyberspace is just keystrokes--quickly scribbled and quickly forgotten. But to publish a book isn't enough: It has to be noticed. And this is where book sections matter. If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books--or on a website written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biografiend? The book review section, whether of a newspaper or a magazine,remains the forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art and argument, and not merely as opportunities for shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting, all too often by kids hoping to be noticed for their sass and vulgarity. Should we allow our culture to descend to this playground level of discourse? Newspapers sift, filter, and evaluate; they are responsible and strive to be trustworthy. So, too, do their book review sections. To curtail such coverage is to abandon an intellectual forum for a childish free-for-all. We would be shortchanging not only readers, but also the art, culture and scholarship of our time.Playgrounds, as we all remember, are ruled by bullies, loud-mouths and prima-donnas.

I thought, well, he hates bloggers and maybe I should write about that. Maybe I should appeal to him on the basis of our mutual love of books, or point out the many impressive authors who have been interviewed at Bookslut, or spoken on the Bat Segundo Show, or participated at the LBC. I thought I would ask him to look at blogs in the kidlitosphere that are constantly championing picture books and middle grade novels, titles that rarely receive more than an occasional paragraph in major newspapers. I was going to ask him if he ever read the insightful posts at The Millions, or Jenny D.'s or TEVs. And how about the way that Gwenda keeps everyone so in tune to the latest in Sci Fi, Fantasy and YA? What about Leila's near daily posts on censorship battles and Jen's literacy links. I was going to write Mr. Dirda a letter and ask him to show me just where the "bullies, loud-mouths and prima-donnas" reside in the lit blogosphere and then point him in the direction of so many intelligent talented bloggers who would show him just how dynamic and smart and witty the lit blogosphere can be.

And then I read some more posts at Critical Mass and I realized that it's not just Michael Dirda who thinks newspaper book sections are the last bastion of literary sanity in American society. Consider Nadine Gordimer's comments:

Q: The other aspect of this is the newspaper sections which cover books -- and bring that discussion to a wide and democratic audience -- are also shrinking.

A: Oh, yes, and the amount of journals where young people can see their first efforts, their first story or their first poem, are disappearing. All of us started that way -- we saw our first efforts published. Looking at it printed there, removed from yourself, you look at it objectively as a reader. It's your own work, but you look at it as a reader. And you see your shortcomings, and you see where you didn’t quite convey what you wanted to. But now that chance is really gone. I was talking to somebody last night, he was saying the same thing about the literary reviews. Almost every college or university used to have a journal. Now there are few left. Virginia Quarterly Review is one of the few left.

I have enormous respect for Ms. Gordimer but clearly she doesn't know anything about the many many many literary journals on the internet. (A visit or Dan Wickett's site wouldn't be out of line to relieve her concerns for young writers.) What really bugs me though is that her interviewer didn't tell her about them either.

And then there's Stewart O'Nan's:

For the literary novelist, it's not just that there are fewer column-inches out there. The real danger is that what little space is left is taken up by books which are marketing events rather than works in need of a thoughtful critique (Harry Potter, trendy political nonfiction, a celebrity author's latest) or by genre stuff that's essentially review-proof (chick-lit, true crime, mysteries, audiobooks). If you're not a hoary eminence or the new kooky flavor-of-the-month or a boring, important award winner, you're lucky to get any press at all. It's hard to blame book page editors, since they're simply echoing what the industry as a whole is doing, but for the serious writer, the crunch is on from both sides.

I'm not even going to touch the part about genre stuff being "essentially review-proof" (WYF) but does he ever visit the internet at all? Does he care about the many sites that actively discuss the work literary novelists? Scott Esposito anyone? Or TEV - and his undying love for John Banville. I would argue that the literary novelists get tons of coverage, it's the genre folks who suffer the most from being ignored by everyone. (This is interesting - a review at Strange Horizon's of O'Nan's Night Country. I wonder how he felt about being reviewed by a genre site?)

I read these thoughts and on top of the recent disagreement at Read Roger over bloggers being neutral enough and then that whole N+1 mess, I can't help but think that really it isn't so much about saving book coverage in newspapers, not really.

It's about book coverage in print being the only coverage that matters.

It's okay for the lit blogosphere to exist as a version of your Mom's book club - it's okay for us to talk books and authors and compare notes of favorites, as long as we keep our place.

Got that? We must not think for a moment that we contribute beyond anything other than as accessories to the real business of reviewing. We serve as table cloths and throw pillows; curtain rods and side tables. Out here on the internet, if you write about books, if you publish new writers, if you interview a great author you are apparently only doing it because the real folks who do this work happen to be busy today. Thinking that the contents of the lit blogosphere (kid lit, genre lit, every part and parcel of it) are in any way comparable to the true lords of the book universe would be highest folly on our parts.

Little children should be seen and not heard, you see. We should buy books but not dare to offer well thought opinions on them.