The Sunday Salon - On Writing About Books

Let me start this by saying that my intent in writing this post is not in the least prescriptive: this is not a post about how people “should” write about books, but a sort of personal manifesto on how and why I do it. What got me thinking about this was a series of posts and comments all over the blogosphere that touch on this subject, both directly and obliquely, and which have been fermenting in my brain for weeks: Melissa’s post “On Objectivity, Niceness and Dialogue” and Liz B’s comment clarifying her understanding of the terms “personal” and “objective” when it comes to reviewing; Amy’s post “Being a Fan” and Jason’s comment about how subjectivity is exactly what makes book blogs appealing to him; Lit Love’s comment about the potential dangers of the blanket of opinion; Chris’ thoughts on the kind of review she personally enjoys writing and reading; and, more recently, Heidenkind’s musings on “Objective Reading”.

Conversations about books can of course exist at different levels: there’s the academic analysis, the slightly less formal but also in-depth critique, the quick recommendation, the informal bookish chat, and so on. Personally I find them all valid, useful and legitimate, and I think it should go without saying that they’re complementary; that there’s more than enough room for all both online and offline. But sadly, defences of one particular approach often turn into attacks of different ones. The last thing I want to do is turn this post into more of that – let us hope that I succeed.

The reason why I enjoy writing about books (and reading other people’s thoughts on them) is because I find that book discussions are an excellent platform for discussing, well, Life, The Universe and Everything. They’re a perfect way for an incurable introvert such as myself to find out how people feel about all sorts of things. If you talk about books for long enough, eventually everything will come up. I realise that my awkwardly earnest kind of approach (sometimes also referred to as “self-indulgent”) is very off-putting for some people, but I’ve made my peace with that. And while this mean that book blogging is extremely personal for me, I’ve come to realise that saying so is risky, as not everybody defines “personal” in the exact same way.

What I seem to be saying here is that I like personal and subjective approaches to discussing literature – but I notice that sometimes people take this to mean that I’m not interested in moving bookish conversations away from how much I happened to enjoy the experience of reading a particular book. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with focusing on that, though that’s not my preferred approach. But that is certainly not what I mean when I say I don’t particularly strive for objectivity.

At the same time, I’m often taken aback by comments about how outrageous it is that any post that contains the phrases “I feel” or “I think” should dare call itself a review. I’m not comfortable with the idea that the absence of these phrases is the one thing that differentiates professional and amateur reviewers, as if not uttering the personal pronoun “I” would magically make you able to do more than see the world (or read a book) from your own limited perspective. I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive to enlarge our own individual perspectives, but it seems to me silly to assume that saying or not saying “I think” is a reliable marker of whether or not we do that.

When I say this I worry that I’ll sound like an anti-intellectual who’s having a go at academia. I’m not one, I assure you, and I highly respect and value knowledge and learning of all kinds. But I notice that intellectual authority, especially in the humanities (and I say this as a passionate humanities girl) is often manufactured and feeds upon itself. One of the things that make you an authority is the fact that you sound like one. You’re objective because you don’t say “I feel that...,” regardless of how narrow what you then go on to say actually is. I could give you quite a few examples of pieces of professional criticism where the author’s personal, political or ideological biases are as clear as daylight.

I confess I’ve always been a bit wary of intellectual authority. This probably sounds immensely arrogant, but that’s not how I mean it, really. I don’t think that I know better than everyone else – I just want to hear more than the one single voice that cloaks itself in authority to silence all the others. One of the problems I have with the idea of implicitly distrusting those who lack expert status is that its counterpart is the idea what we should trust those who do have it blindly. And that doesn’t always quite work out.

To which extent can we step outside ourselves when talking about books? To which extent should we? Of course, by now you might be thinking, “Define ‘step outside yourself, please’”, and with good reason. I don’t know that I can, and I struggle with these conversations exactly because of all these hazy definitions. I think I’ll have to cheat here and borrow Jason’s comment on Amy’s aforementioned post, as it perfectly describes the kind of bookish conversation I like best and strive to have myself:

A moderately objective description of an artwork can give me an idea of whether I will subjectively like it (sometimes), but it doesn't make me feel connected to the book, or, more importantly, the author of the review. Subjectivity in description is how I see you, the human being (…) I think the book review tradition, and in some sense the influence of the publishing industry, gives us the impression sometimes that the most important part of a review is whether or not it gives you the information you need to choose whether you plan on adding the book to your TBR list. This is certainly valuable, and certainly PART of it. But I think the bigger piece of it is making human connections, and that takes subjectivity, it takes very individual, idiosyncratic passion, whether that passion is 'right' or not.

This is what I mean when I say I’m interested in personal opinions – but then again, the sacredness of opinion is often used to defend statements of the “this book sucks because I say so, and if you disagree you must be stupid” variety, which don’t exactly appeal to me (though I’ll acknowledge people’s right to make them if they choose, as well as my right not to read them).

What I most enjoy reading about, in both amateur and professional criticism, is how a human being understood a particular literary work, and especially how that understanding relates to their overall experience of being human. This isn’t, of course, the only valid way to talk about books, but it’s the one that I happen to find the most rewarding and satisfying.

And yet ironically (considering everything I’ve said above), I find I’m not always comfortable with the word “review”, and I often dodge from using it to refer to my own blog posts. I’ve also noticed that I’m not alone in this. Why is that? What do I think is missing? What do you think is missing, if you happen to avoid the word too? What makes a review legitimate? Or is the problem simply that the idea that our lack of expert status means we have no legitimacy has been hammered into our heads for so long that we implicitly accept it, even as rationally we rebel against it?

What I really want to ask you today, though, is why YOU write about books. Do you hope to recommend (or not) books that you enjoyed reading? To share your passion for the written medium? To make better sense of yourself and of the world in the process? To use books as a starting point to discuss things that matter to you? Do you find the process of writing reviews intensely personal, or is it something more intellectual and removed? Or is it both? And how do you feel about the validity of different types of bookish conversation?

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