So what’s the purpose of a book review?

While chatting recently to a friend about book reviews and their purpose, he came up with a definition: ‘To help the writers know they are understood and appreciated without too much attention to their mistakes, to help the readers know whether or not it is for them, to identify one or two critical issues worth discussing along the way, and to ease the conscience of the reviewer about all the free books s/he has acquired through this means, not all of which were ever read’. Doesn’t cover all bases, to be sure, but it’s as good a definition as I’ve encountered.

5 comments

  4. Hey Jason. I do like the modesty of this definition. Writing reviews ought to be a modest activity. That said, I’m still not entirely sure I want to read reviews by people who understand their job in the way that your friend is suggesting. I suppose that for me, in the background are some of the issues that George Steiner has raised about the habits and practices of contemporary academic culture in his Real Presences (and also, in a less obvious way perhaps, his Norton lectures). For readers to read a review of a book to “know whether or not it is for them” and to have identified for them a few critical issues takes for granted a certain style of academic life, which we sometimes rail against while at the same time accepting as basically the way things are. But what if we imagined a different style… one where reviewers were not the guardians at the gate so much as insightful and provocative commentators whose goal was to further a critical and lively discussion which, ipso facto, they assumed their readers already to be engaged in. We’ve all read the book, and the one before that, now let’s have a serious discussion about it. That would free reviewers from the now redundant (and frankly boring – for both them and their readers) task of providing synopses. It would, furthermore, take readers seriously… by presuming that they are already intelligent and well-read, and that they don’t need the guidance of the reviewer, but want rather to continue a lively conversation. Finally, in its own way, this may be a more modest, if also more difficult, account of the reviewer’s task than that which you are suggesting. To know that you are always coming after the work… neither introducing it nor patronizing either its readers or, indeed, its author.

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  5. André, many thanks for your comments. I find part of me agreeing strongly you, while another part is not so enthusiastic. Perhaps your comments highlight (at least) that there remains a place for different kinds of book reviews. I, for one, am grateful that there are both those that assume significant, if not entire, ignorance of the book (in which case a synopsis is great and far from ‘redundant’), and those which strive to continue the conversation further. Both kinds can still be written in a way that assumes an ‘intelligent and well-read’ readership. Where I think that we might be in full agreement concerns those ‘reviews’ which read more like ads from the publisher. Again, thanks for your thoughts.

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