May

10

Weren’t We Just Here?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 10, 2007 |

Don’t forget to enter the Just-Write Summer Reading Contest!

Former San Francisco Chronicle book critic and NEA Literature Director David Kipen has just published an article in Salon titled Last Exit to Book Land which, while similar to Michael Connelly’s op-ed in The Los Angeles Times , takes a slightly different tack. While Connelly warned, rightly, that newspapers were endangering their own futures by cutting book reviews, Kipen takes a broader view.

Referring readers to some staggeringly depressing statistics published in the NEA Report Reading At Risk Kipen also offers some hope for the future of reading. The National Book Critics circle has posted tips for saving book reviews, and is circulating a petition to reinstate Teresa Weaver, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s former book editor. As the petition points out, Atlanta is “#15 on the University of Wisconsin’s list of most literate cities in the U.S.”. Even if that wasn’t because of the newspaper’s book section, a major part of Atlanta’s community now has one less reason to keep subscribing–and possibly even a reason to cancel their subscription entirely.

Even if newspapers stop contributing to their communities culturally Kipen also offers hope in the form of the NEA’s Big Read program, helping to sponsor CityRead programs that started in cities like Seattle and Chicago. The Big Read program helps out cities with smaller library budgets. Personally I wonder about the effectiveness of programs that encourage an entire community to read a book, but then reading is a solitary activity. Even if these programs don’t foster literacy but only bring together people who are already reading it’s still contributing to a sense of community.

When I wrote about the subject of disappearing book review sections last week I also forgot to mention something extremely important: local weeklies. My home town has the Nashville Scene which carries book reviews in every issue, and sometimes books or authors of local interest are front-page stories. Not too shabby for a beat a growing number of dailies seem to consider not worth the ink. While not every city is big enough to have an alternative weekly, they are one place where book coverage still survives and thrives. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Update: Check out the article Battle of the Book Reviews in the Los Angeles Times Calendar Live. As staff writer Josh Getlin explains, traditional book reviewers and bloggers are battling it out and the time has come for a truce. Did it ever have to be a battle in the first place? Why would traditional reviewers feel threatened by bloggers, and why would bloggers feel threatened by traditional reviewers, especially when there’s so much cross-hybridization? Blogs can be anywhere and be accessed from anywhere. Increasingly the same is true of newspapers, but, in theory at least, a newspaper book reviewer should be someone from your community. What other purpose would a local newspaper serve–since book reviews are news?


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