Where should you read book reviews? Perhaps I can be forgiven for hoping that you might enjoy reading them in these pages — although, as long-serving readers know, it’s not just reviews that we offer here in Books but Life, the Universe and Everything. I put the question, however, because there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle recently — fuffled by Susan Hill on her website (www.susan-hill.com) and John Sutherland in a rival organ.
“I have been growing more and more sure that the traditional book pages of most of the national newspapers are largely irrelevant,” Hill wrote. While we took comfort in that “most” — and were specially pleased when she felt moved to elaborate, see right — her complaint was that literary pages, by and large, ignored “real” readers; who are found, these days, making their presence and tastes felt on online. Sutherland had written of the reviewers opining away on Amazon and the like: “There are those who see web- reviewing (whether independent bloggery, or commercially hosted) as a ‘power to the reader’ trend — the democratisation of something traditionally monopolised by literary mandarins. And there are those who see it as the degradation of literary taste.”
It’s not a black and white choice. It comes down, however, to a question of trust. Your friend Stella tells you that she just loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; you trust Stella, and so you’ll probably take a chance; unless you also know that anything Stella likes you’re bound to loathe, in which case, you’ll give it a miss.
The trouble with blogging, and online reviewing, is that it can seem anonymous: who is “The Raven”? Or “KL”? I don’t know. But maybe you do, and you trust him (or her, or it) the way that I trust, say, Marcel Berlins or Amanda Craig or Peter Ackroyd. Even if I don’t always agree with them, I’m interested in their (always considered) opinions and the discussions those opinions might provoke.
We hope, here in Books, to help readers choose books — and talk about them, too. At timesonline.co.uk/books, you are now able to have blog-style discussions of what we have reviewed. Hill tells us, alas, that one literary editor responded to her own blog by announcing that he (or she) would no longer review her books. What a shame. I fear that this displays just the closed-mindedness that she is so right to deplore.