There's been a rash of discussion of late in regards to book reviewing. Why is it important? What should a review do? What is its purpose? Why are there so many reviewers out there who don't know how to write one properly? How DO you write a proper book review? What can be done with the book sections being dwindled or cut from major newspapers across the country? Harper's Magazine weighs in. In the December issue there's a story written by Wyatt Mason. Entitled "Among the Reviewers" it tries to answer some of the questions posed above with a focus on John Updike, who probably has reviewed more books than anyone alive.
From the article:
In the forty-nine years since Updike’s first collection of poetry, The Carpentered Hen, appeared in 1958, amid the fifty-nine books that have followed—six subsequent poetry collections, five children’s books, one memoir, a play, fifteen collections of stories, and twenty-two novels—there also have been eight collections of essays...Updike has...been generating essays that cover a hodgepodge of topics: art, golf, health, fashion, media, America, and others still. The essays alone run to nearly five thousand pages. Of these volumes, the six largest have been devoted mostly to a single subject—books—three hundred signed reviews of which have appeared in The New Yorker. (Updike also wrote dozens of unsigned reviews for that magazine’s “Briefly Noted” section)...All told, Updike has published more than a million words on books.
The story is worth reading if you're at all interested in the state of book reviewing today and, further, the work of the amazingly prolific and amazingly talented Mr. Updike.
As a brief side note, don't forget to read my story soon on Michael Bloomfield, a preeminent collector of all things Updike, coming soon in Fine Books and Collections Magazine.
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