AWP President Catherine Brady on the Value of Book Reviewers

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign’s blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Catherine Brady is president of AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which supports more than 28,000 writers in more than 400 member colleges and universities and 95 writers; conferences and centers. She is the author of two short story collections and an assistant professor in the MFA in writing program at the University of San Francisco.

The book reviewer is the matchmaker between writer and reader--sometimes fussing about the writer/suitor’s sloppy appearance; sometimes warning off the unsuspecting reader; sometimes cajoling reluctant lovers who approach the whole thing skeptically; and sometimes felicitously pairing two soul mates. For me, too many romances might never have been if not for a book review that tempted me to take a chance. As a reader, even more than as a writer, I’m compelled to campaign for newspapers and journals to continue publishing book reviews, and plenty of them.

This may seem like a request for charity: after all, people who run personal ads pay for them. If books can’t hold their own against all the attractive alternatives—video games, the Internet, movies—why should any newspaper or journal assume a civic duty to continue publishing book reviews? In this culture we are inundated with information, delivered at an increasingly fragmented and indiscriminate pace: Britney Spears’s trip to rehab vies with news from Iraq vies with a soldier’s personal photos posted on the web on the day they were taken. We can find refuge from this breakneck assault in a medium that compacts what may be years of research and contemplation into portable form, one that offers insight at a pace we determine for ourselves. A reader, unlike a viewer, can pause to take in information, retrace her steps, participate in the evolution of the text. (Compare literature to other art forms and you’ll see what I mean: no audience member at a concert or a dance performance is challenged to imaginatively contribute to the performance in the way that a reader of a good poem visualizes an image made with words, draws on his own life experience to decipher meaning, or alertly registers subtext.)

Plenty of alarming statistics document the decline of literacy in this country, offering plenty of reasons for the shrinking number of venues for book reviews. But those who decide the battle is already lost are guilty of a failure of faith and a failure of will. As a writer who teaches creative writing and literature, I can tell you that given the chance and even a little encouragement, people respond deliriously to good books. As president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, I can assure you that the book world’s Lonely Hearts club is thriving, its members resolutely hopeful about every new prospect. To allude to mysterious market forces as a reason for not publishing book reviews sidesteps the fact that market forces most often result from human choice. We all need to promote books, and we need to promote reading not as a peripheral, arcane hobby of the privileged but as a functional and essential part of contemporary life. When a book reviewer brings a book out of lonely obscurity into public space, s/he makes a miracle possible. A book can dismantle any barrier between any two people. Any barrier—of class, culture, age, or life experience.--Catherine Brady