This is, as the title states, part 3 of this discussion. If you haven’t kept up, please see part 1 and part 2 before reading this installment. This part consists of a review of the bloggers’ side, focusing on one person’s post, and my overall conclusions.

Ready? Here we go!

The other hand’s take:

1. Trish states that book reviews on blogs are given as much respect as book reviews in newspapers, citing the myriad of authors and publishers sending ARCs to book bloggers these days.
2. “Blogging is inherently informal.”
3. Book blog reviews are written in a conversational style, “like I’m chatting with a friend.”
4. The point of blogging is to be self-indulgent.

My response: To point one of the internet advocate: Yep. Apparently many book publicists find value in the work of book bloggers in promoting their books. To point two: Again, yep. For the most part, blogging is informal, and I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. Some blogs are more professional than others.

On point three: A conversational style isn’t all bad. It isn’t all good, either. There are pros and cons to both conversational, informal writing and professional, formal writing. Books are often discussed in both voices. It seems the Unites States (maybe the world is?) are becoming more informal. Even newspapers are becoming more informal. Isn’t the fact that such formal stanchions as the book review sections of newspapers are dying some evidence of this? This is the way of the world. It’s not all bad. Why fight it?

Point four: Here is where I take issue with Trish and the book blogging community that is up in arms about Warren’s critique.

Trish writes:

Blogging is the place that I can say, I can do what I want when I want to and I can make it look however I want. If I want to say like or alls or dude or WHATEVER, I can. More importantly, the reason I read bloggers’ book reviews is because I don’t want some pompous ass talking about things like What’s the book’s place in the canon.

I know blogs exist that stand on this platform of I Can Do Whatever I Want. I don’t read them. It’s Ethics 101 that to be an upstanding member of any society, one’s freedom stops where another person’s begins. It’s smart to waiting before pushing the Publish button if you’ve written in anger. Sure, we have freedom of speech, but I also have freedom to not intentionally hurt other people. Mrs. Chili wrote a nice post about this recently. Maybe the freedom Trish was thinking of wouldn’t be painful to others, but it’s a slippery slope.

—

I’ll be the first to say, I don’t consider this blog a book blog, exactly. My reviews are skimpy and can hardly be called full reviews. I started, this year, to catalog each book I read here in part just for personal reference; I’ve started a list each year, intending to write down each book I read for a full year, but the list is always abandoned by about February. This blogging plan is working much better for me — it’s August and I haven’t messed it up yet.

However, I have been thinking about improving my reviews here — beefing them up and making them more meaningful. I still struggle with how much I can say without giving something away, though. I haven’t taken Book Reviewing 101 like Warren suggests.

I’ll end on this note: I’m not sure what newspaper book reviews have done to sustain books; I’m not sure they exactly need saving, even. A point from Warren I think we can all agree on: “Blogs stoke public interest.” Isn’t that what the old media reviews were intended to do?

Whew! Made it through. Your thoughts?

This is, as the title states, part 2 of this discussion. If you haven’t kept up, please see part 1 here before reading this installment. This part consists of a review of Lissa Warren’s column that touched off this entire debate. In the third installment I’ll review and comment on the indignant book bloggers’ side.

The first hand’s take: A representative-apparent of the old guard, Lissa Warren (a book publicist and editor) wrote (in a newspaper column) that blogs aren’t (and won’t become) an adequate replacement for these old standbys, the standalone book review sections of major newspapers.

She points out a few book blogs she reads, two of which are in my feed reader — the New York Times’ Paper Cuts and The Elegant Variation. She finds fault with even these, though.

Warren’s main criticisms of book blogs?

1. Instead of offering original reviews, they often link to reviews in paper media.
2. Blogs, by format, are too short.
3. Reviews on blogs are self-indulgent.
4. They lack a book summary and an introduction to the book’s main characters.

My response: I read a lot of blogs — at the moment, my feed reader holds 112 subscriptions. Not all of them are book blogs, but a good number of them do discuss books on a fairly regular basis. The first two criticisms don’t hold water, to use the old cliche. Warren herself knocks down her straw-man argument for the second. In addition, there are some blogs that offer lengthy, in-depth reviews. These three come to mind.

The first? In the blogs she cites, perhaps those newspaper reviews actually did start the conversation — apparently they were published before the blog post went live. I don’t, however, the the blogs I read, find most (or many, for that matter) reviews linking to a review in the old media. {Even if they did, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that.}

Now we’ve reached her third point. I’ll let this stand in her own words:

Well, I think book reviews on blogs — particularly those of the Blogspot variety — tend to be self-indulgent. Book reviewing bloggers need to move away from opinion in favor of judgment. How does the book compare to — and fit in with — the author’s previous work? What’s the book’s place in the genre? The canon? Does the writer succeed in doing what he or she set out to do — meaning, is it the book they meant it to be? Whether it’s the book the blogger wanted it to be is of much less importance to me, frankly.

I’d also advise that book reviewing bloggers jettison the use of personal pronouns (yes, I’ve used a slew of them here; you can nail me in the comments). And for goodness sake, I wish they’d stop telling me what their father and their girlfriend — or their father’s girlfriend — thought of the book. Also, I don’t need to know how they came to possess the book — how they borrowed it from the library, or bought it at B&N, or snagged a galley at The Strand, or got the publisher to send them a copy even though they average four hits a day. The banal back-story is of little interest.

Emphasis in the original.

[Wow, she uses a lot of dashes.]

Yikes. I’d label that vitriolic. (That last sentence is judgment, by the way, not opinion.)

I try, when I write my own measly reviews, to make sure I do address the book’s relation to the author’s previous work, the book’s genre and the canon, when I’m significantly versed in such to have and/or voice an opinion. Sometimes I’m not, though. A reader’s reaction to the first work she’s read by a given author is in some ways just as valid as the reaction of a reader who has read all of that author’s works; they’re different reactions, in terms of depth and familiarity.

How the reviewer feels about the book is important to me. As I read that person’s reviews over time, I’ll come to know how that blog’s taste matches or clashes with mine. Without this, what’s the point? Maybe I’m being obtuse. I don’t really understand this point.

Personal pronouns should be removed? That’s such a small thing to take issue with. There is also a not-quite-stated-in-words criticism in Warren’s opinion piece, though, that blogs are written informally and are prone to grammar and usage flaws. While this may be true of some blogs, it’s harsh and over the top to apply this fault to blogs across the board; that’s just not true! Informal? Sure. I think it’s valid in this medium. The back story is important to me, as well.

Now to point four above. First, I know all blog book reviews don’t lack this. But I also question the need for plot summaries and an overview of characters to be in book reviews. First of all, this information is readily available. The reviewer could quote Amazon or the book jacket. But this isn’t original content. If a blog mention lacks this, I can just click over to Amazon in a new tab and read about it there (or in BookMooch, LibraryThing, GoodReads … or, if all else fails, there’s always Wikipedia and/or Google). I don’t feel the need for summaries and character overviews to clog up my feed reader. Actually, if I’m interested in reading a book, I sometimes have regretted reading the book cover beforehand — it gave too much away. I usually don’t read it.

I’ll leave this side of the debate now with another quote from Warren:

I can’t ignore the power of blogs to stoke the public interest, any more than I can ignore the fact that the traditional book review outlets are drying up and no one has yet determined how to save them. No, I don’t believe blogs will save books — not in their current format. But I can envision a day when blogs do for books what books have done for people: challenged us, made us think in ways we never would have.

Part 3, coming soon!

Criticism is and has been circling the web the last several weeks. Until now, I’ve chosen to remain quiet and just listen. There are such strong feelings on both sides of this debate, like so many. I can see some of what both sides say, but I can’t align myself with either side. I’m pulled in several directions here.

Once I completed my coverage and analysis of this discussion, I decided to break it into three parts for the sake of length. This first part is an introduction to and overview of the situation.

First, let’s set the stage.

The subject: Will the death of newspaper book review sections hurt books and the literary community in general?

On the one hand: The literary guard.

On the other: Quite a few book bloggers.

Disclaimer: I never could really get into the reviews in newspaper book sections. They’re long, and so many of the books they review are books I’ve never heard of, I most likely can’t get at my library, and I may not be interested in reading.

The back story: Major newspapers have been closing down their respective standalone book review sections, sometimes eliminating the content and related positions entirely, other papers eliminating some positions and crowding the book reviews into another section with less space. [This hasn't been happening at smaller newspapers because they didn't have standalone book review sections to begin with.] Part of this issue, although not really discussed alongside, to my knowledge, is how major newspapers’ collective future has been in question for quite awhile now. The logical question is, then, what will replace these reviews in the collective? Stated another way: How will readers learn of new, quality books? It’s the answer to this question that the current controversy stems from.

A good two-sided conversation on the subject: Here, from PBS. I especially liked this exchange:

JEFFREY BROWN: If all that is going on online, what’s lost if papers don’t have their own special sections anymore?

KASSIA KROZSER: Steve is probably going to disagree, but I say nothing.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Let me ask — go ahead, Steve.

STEVE WASSERMAN: Well, to oppose the Internet I suppose would be like to oppose climate change. I have no problem with the vast democracy wall that the Internet provides on which everyone, every crank and every sage can post his or her pronunciamento.

But what’s lost here is the discriminatory filter provided by people who have embraced journalism as a craft. What has been lost here is the authority, such as it ever was, of newspaper people trying to do a job well done.

I do not see foreign coverage being replaced by the activity of individuals on the Internet bloviating about this or that.

And despite the robust nature or at least the very excited nature of the conversation on the Internet, the best criticism still being written today is being published, say, in magazines, James Wood in the New Yorker, or Leon Wieseltier in the pages of the New Republic, or Christopher Hitchens in the pages of the Atlantic.

And it will be a long time before the Internet gives us a forum in which such people unsupported by institutions can deliver us that kind of literary criticism. At their best, the newspapers were an exercise in delivering to us that kind of informed criticism, which was the work of professionals who had devoted a lifetime to the consideration of literature.

I’ll post subsequent segments of this discussion soon.

Remember that game we used to play as kids? The one where the participants sit in a long line, the first person whispers something in her neighbor’s ear, and then that person, and each subsequent person, is tasked to repeat what they heard, on down the line. Perhaps that’s what happened here. Except this is online, copy-and-pasting, no whispering needed.

Here’s what I know: BBC, via a poll, voting and a television show, determined the 100 best reads in the UK. In 2003. Now, in the last week, there are tons of Google results for blogs that have posted the list, meme-style, cataloging (should that be catalouging since this is a UK list?) which titles they’ve read and so forth. Here’s the telephone-game aspect, though: There are at least two versions of the list floating around; logically, only one of them conforms to the BBC list.

I’ve decided, although the errant list came across my feed reader, that I will complete this list-meme starting with the official BBC list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s [Sorcerer's in USA] Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love in The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls in Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

So there you have it, my attempt to get back to the original, to correct whispers flying around these internets.

I saw another version that let you bracket the ones you’ve seen as movies. Go ahead and add that when you complete this, if you want. I may have read more of these (Jane Austen, *hangs head*), but I don’t remember them, so I didn’t mark them. I count 31 titles above that I’ve read and marked as bold.

I had been wondering, while watching the games of the 29th Olympiad (and so much reporting on same), which was the correct way to pronounce the name of this, the capital city of China, Beijing. Turns out, yes, there is.

I’ve heard it pronounced a couple different ways mostly — with a hard J sound and instead with a softer sound, as in measure.

I came across the answer in my feed reader today. Thank you, Language Log. Along with the answer to my query, the post is quite interesting. Have a read!

Update: Another post over at Language Log, this time posing the query, do people who live in Beijing really pronounce the hard J? Like me, they’re apparently given to “gliding over” or slurring consonants.

A stimulating blog and podcast I’ve followed since it started (I think, anyway; it’s hard for me to keep track sometimes with a stuffed-to-the-gills feed reader) just posted an episode about mysteries!

I added all of the recommended books to my wishlists, with an emphasis on the first three. Two of the recommended titles also star newspaper journalists and even a newsroom. What fun!

This from Shelf Awareness:

The winners of the 2008 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Awards, which honor authors from the Midwest Booksellers Association region and books about the region:

Winners
• Fiction: Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan (Ballantine)
• Nonfiction: Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (Bantam)
• Poetry: Valentines: Poems by Ted Kooser, illustrated by Robert Hanna (University of Nebraska Press)
• Children’s Picture Book: Agate: What Good Is a Moose? by Joe Morgan Dey and Nikki Johnson (Lake Superior Port Cities)
• Children’s Literature: Little Klein by Anne Ylvisaker (Candlewick Press)

Honor Books
• Fiction (tie): So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger (Atlantic Monthly Press) and Whistling in the Dark by Lesley Kagen (Penguin)
• Nonfiction: The Florist’s Daughter: A Memoir by Patricia Hampl (Harcourt)
• Poetry: Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems by Deborah Keenan (Milkweed Editions)
• Children’s Picture Book: Great Joy by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Bagram Ilbatoulline (Candlewick Press)
• Children’s Literature: The Gollywhopper Games by Jody Feldman, illustrated by Victoria Jamieson (Greenwillow Books)

The Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Awards will be presented September 25 during the MBA annual trade show in St. Paul, Minnesota.

This is interesting to me for several reasons: Most regional fiction I’ve heard about is Southern literature. I grew up in the Midwest, but I didn’t even know there were so many books written in and/or about that lesser-known region. Sure, I knew that some authors live there, and there’s perhaps one? famous author of years past (I’m thinking of Willa Cather; can you add to this meager “list”? ) who hailed from the region, but I haven’t heard of nor read many books of this part of the country.

Now — when I live in an area on the cusp of two regions, technically in a Southern state but in an area with several of the characteristics of the Midwest — fiction tied to a region is quite interesting to me.

First there was a small coffee counter in the corner of the big bookstore. Then, we found a certain book title for sale at the small (in square footage but massive chain-wise) coffee house. But now, Starbucks (Germany) offers another idea for combining these two loves:

Here’s a different kind of Starbucks book promotion, one that will take place September 17-October 7 in selected Starbucks in Germany, as reported by the Schweizer Buchhandel (Swiss Bookselling) newsletter [This site appears to be in German, so unfortunately I couldn't confirm what's quoted here nor add to it.].

In cooperation with Zurich’s Diogenes publishing house (think Knopf or Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Starbucks is putting on a Mystery Festival Coffee & Crime program that consists of 11 readings in nine cities featuring six mystery authors and an audiobook narrator (reading Georges Simenon books). Another 125 German Starbucks will feature a “reference library” of works by the authors and information about the readings. Another display offers excerpts and advises customers that books by the authors are available in bookstores. At the readings, book sales will be handled by local bookstores; Starbucks is not selling any of the Diogenes titles.

The partners are also putting on a lottery in all German Starbucks—prizes consist of books and coffee.

Sounds like fun!

Via Shelf Awareness.

And now, the fourth in the Mitford series, Out to Canaan by Jan Karon.

Set again in the small town of Mitford, western North Carolina, this book continues the story of Father Tim and Cynthia, but really the story of the entire town as well as much of the nearby loose community called the Creek.

As I was casually thinking about this book the other day, I realized I don’t know many other series that center around a person in his 60s. Sure, there’s a book here or there, but for a character that we know through an ongoing connection, it seems a bit more rare than stories that star younger people.

The authors website.

Next on my stack: An author I’ve never read before, but who comes highly recommended by good reading friends.

The third book in the Mitford series, These High, Green Hills by Jan Karon was in my library stack on Friday; I finished reading it Sunday.

I’m so intrigued by these books. Reading them is, in some ways, like taking a vacation and exploring a quaint but kind small Southern town. It’s so striking, how Mitford is so unlike any small town I’ve lived in, though. I still don’t know what to do about that, in my head.

There’s so much in these books I do relate to, though. The newspaper that has so many misspellings and that covers every little happening. The small diner. How in the book we know pretty much what’s happening in the lives of everyone in town. The lovely main street. The church committees.

Next on my list: number four in the Mitford series, Out to Canaan.