As my faithful readers have noticed, I've picked up quite a bit of work reviewing books over the past year. It started out with me posting my own reviews of books that I read, loved, and needed to tell my sliver of the world. I'd dare say that 90% of the books I read are not on the NY Times best seller list, heck make that 99%. That same percentage are women authors and at the same time feminist works of literature as well. I feel it is my duty as a feminist book reader to tell you all to go pick up that book and read it as well.

One bit of advice I keep getting over the years as I attempt to hone my craft as an activist/advocate is to write, write, write...and read. What better way for me to sharpen my writing than to blog about what I just read? As a kid I hated writing book reports because they seemed so lame - even as I chugged them out 2-3 times a week. I read a lot of short books. Hey, the teacher valued quantity as well as quality.

Thanks to Get Them Blogging and MotherTalk, I'm just about up to my ears in books to read & review. Three years ago if you had told me that 1) I'd get free books in the mail just for blogging about them and 2) I'd have time to read them all, I would told you to get outta here. This experience has been fabUlous. It has forced to pay closer attention to the writing of the books I read instead of just getting lost in the story. My book club kinda did that, but there's something about putting words out into the blogosphere that makes me take that job a bit more seriously.

You can imagine the fury that went thru my mind when I read on Echidne of the Snakes that a book reviewer, Richard Schickel, is a tad pissy that us bloggers are taking his work:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

I'll admit that I'm not trained to write reviews, but I guess that's why I get paid in books. One of his main arguments is that my opinion doesn't mean poop:

Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken, because the review's highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.

Looking back at my archives and the number of comments I get on book review posts, I'd have to say that I'm not adding much to "intelligent dialogue about" the book (see what happens when you don't comment!). That said, most days I have at least one visitor who comes here because they were looking for a review of a book I have read.

Schickel wraps up with the flawed logic that because writing a print review is permanent, that blogging a review is somehow temporary:

The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.

Tell that one to anyone who has ever posted something stupid on their blog and had that show up high on their Google name list. In what seems to be a hastily written blog post criticizing bloggers who are criticizing Jessica Valenti's book, Jill wrote some iffy statements. She then comes back to apologize for those statements. Tell Jill that her blog post isn't permanent.

I emailed a few other book reviewer bloggers (are we bobloggers? borebloggers? ha!) and learned that this is NOT Schickel's first pooping onto us bloggers. Am I feeding into what must be his HUGE desire to be heard on this topic? Yeah, but blame Echinde for that. I get as many readers a day as she gets in about 10 minutes. *wink* Schickel threw this blog-bomb out there way back in March at a writing conference:

And then suddenly, he veered off course and said that blogging is for idiots. That no one reads a blog except your mother and maybe your cousin, and that it’s stupid to write without getting paid for it. If I heard him correctly, he described blogs as the “near beer” of the writing world.

The irony of this is that the SAME day he said this, his daughter's book was part of a "blog tour" over at MotherTalk. Hmmm...I wonder what the next family dinner was like...Bread anyone?

The thing is that we've all been here before and will continue to have to defend our blogging honor. "Real" journalists still debate whether bloggers should have media credentials, "real" videographers will argue whether or not CNN asking for video has ruined media, and now we have a "real" reviewer wondering if my itty bitty blog with barely 40 visitors a day is hurting his career. My, what a fragile ego we have.

What I have seen in my short time in blogging for books is that it is a community event. I go to other blogs to read what others have to say. It's half-review and half-book club. Just as I don't really care what Rich R. has to say about movies, but love to read Steve's reviews on Gapers Block. It's not just that I adore the owner of GB or that it's online, but I know Steve is far geekier than I am and so if something makes him laugh, I can pretty much guess correctly if it will do the same for me. IOW, I can relate to Steve. Just as I hope that those reading my reviews can relate to me. I can't relate to RR nor do I relate to most mainstream book reviewers. Plus, I rarely read mainstream stuff (I'll return to that next week).

Will I stop reviewing books? Not as long as they keep coming free to my mailbox from the PUBLISHERS. Will my writing get better? I hope so.

Labels: blogging, Books, writing