It's no secret that I love the book-ish types. (Read this review of Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park. A wicked delight. Or this favorite, by Elle Woods via the estimable and unspellable Michiko Kakutani.) For the past few years, newspapers have been drastically cutting back on book reviews, which is bad for books of course, but doubly bad for... er... human beings. It's a good time to remind ourselves what book criticism and reviews are for. The National Book Critics Circle's blog has a series on the crisis, and we'll be talking to the president of the NBCC today.
What do you think book reviews are for? I think that old grump H.L. Mencken said it best... "The motive of the critic who is really worth reading... is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist." The same is true for reviews... they're certainly useful for pointing out Lunar Park as something best bought on sale and brought to the beach, but on their own, they're some of our most important belle-lettres.
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