Thanks to Keir Graff at the Booklist blog for noticing this week’s spate of posts on the negative waves that some people have noticed in book reviewing—and in rounding up my scattered thoughts on the subject, Graff pulls back the Booklist curtain, explaining that although the magazine has a reputation for being “nice,” their policy is actually a little bit different than that: “We’ll only review a book if we can recommend it in some way,” he says, “OR if you absolutely need to know about it.” If faced with a bad debut novel, though, the editors would likely just ignore it: “Panning a first novel doesn’t help our audience much and can be cruel to the author—although, if it’s a hugely hyped first novel whose release is highly anticipated, well, we just might make an exception.”
That explains why the magazine called Marisha Pessl‘s Special Topics in Calamity Physics “extravagantly arch and self-conscious” and “almost compelling enough to warrant its excessive length,” considered National Book Award nominee Mischa Berlinski‘s Fieldwork “somewhat clumsy,” and I’m not even seeing a review for fellow nominee Josh Ferris‘s Then We Came to the End. Which just goes to show that everybody’s got their own tastes; PW gave Ferris and Pessl starred reviews, although it shared some misgivings about Berlinski’s “uneven thriller”—but even that book has clearly gone on to find its ideal audience.