Books are celebrated for being provocative, but the readers being provoked are almost never people who belong to the same social and political tribe as the reviewer

Sunday, February 2nd, 2025

Why is there so much conventionality in what the book media celebrates?, Freddie deBoer asks:

For one thing, books take a long time to read and review, much longer than a movie or album. This means that people within book reviewing circles often feel pressure to devote their limited reading time to the same small number of titles each year.

[…]

The books that receive a great deal of attention often do so because the publishing company has decided to invest enough resources and effort into willing that outcome into being. Most critics follow the crowd when it comes to their opinion on a given book, and when they embrace their inner contrarian they tend to do so in predictable ways. (Some people love to be the one lonely voice in the wilderness, calling out a beloved book as a fraud, but if you’re motivated to be that voice rather than by your organic feelings about a book, then you’re still beholden to the crowd, still captive to other people’s tastes.) Books are celebrated for being provocative, but the readers being provoked are almost never people who belong to the same social and political tribe as the reviewer. (Please direct your provocations only towards those the reviewer would like to see provoked, thank you.) Certain kinds of ideas and certain kinds of stories are privileged, and much more than that, certain kinds of writers.

Comments

  1. Jim says:

    David Irving, Principal Provocateur.

  2. T. Beholder says:

    Ha. That’s a good one!

    - Explores a big sweeping vision of history through some individual person, event, social movement, or technology, with a title and marketing materials that attach truly unrealistic importance to said person, event, movement, or technology; [...] How the Color Mauve Built the Modern World or Why Ms. Pacman Was the True Leader of the Reaganite Order
    - History, in the sense of the assemblage of discrete bits of information that constitute a broad understanding about a particular time period, is a secondary or tertiary concern compared to the justification of the central thesis; indeed, a good gloss on this kind of book is a version of history in which facts are subservient to ideas
    - Views the past in a way that suggests that the study of history is the act of assembling anecdotes that underline the book’s big-think message, the one usually expressed in the subtitle; history arranges itself into this convenient format at suspiciously high frequencies
    - Omitting inconvenient details and examples that do not fit the described trend is the single most important task in composing the text
    - [...] the blanks in our history are not a statement of our inevitable human limitation but instead an implication of sequel potential.

    It’s almost like this describes some distinct genre.

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