User Submitted Blog Post: The Future of Reviewing

Every so often here I've hit on the theme of how mainstream book reviewers and bloggers get along. I try not to dive too deep into this particular business---I figure it's deathly boring to the people who aren't in the middle of it, and I also figure there's more agreement than differences between those two communities. (After all, plenty of mainstream book reviewers blog and and plenty of litbloggers get bylines in book reviews.) But it opens up a more interesting question: What role do average readers play in the middle of all this? GalleyCat made a provocative statement on the matter earlier this week. In a post titled "Will Video Kill the Book Review Stars?" Ron Hogan points to a young reader's enthusiastic video review of Tom Rob Smith's new thriller, Child 44, as a way to suggest that such vlogs threaten to supplant mainstream book reviews.

I don't necessarily disagree with Hogan's argument that "passionate, heartfelt recommendations from people with whom you have ongoing relationships/conversations online will carry greater weight than detached critical evaluations." Of course word-of-mouth matters. But the replacement for the book review? Well, I went ahead and transcribed the review below. (It's not a perfect transcription, I know.) Would you be OK with this instead of a piece on the book the New York Times Book Review?

I've just read the most fantastic book of my life. This book is called Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. A very original name. He's only 28 years old, and he graduated from Cambridge. Here is a photograph of him [shows author photo on dust jacket].

Now, this book is a thriller, and it's set in Soviet Russia. It is amazing. If you're looking for a book to read in, like, a couple of nights, this is a good one. It's almost 500 pages, but every page, you just want to keep [flips through pages], keep turning it, keep turning it! It's really awesome.

There's never a moment where I was like, "Ugh, when's this chapter gonna end?" Cos I didn't really want any of the chapters to end, cos it was really, really, really awesome.

There are a lot of characters, so sometimes you get a little bit confused, but in a thriller---they're supposed to be a little bit confusing, I think. A little bit of suspense. A little bit of oh-my-god moments. Cos there are a lot of those in this book. I was totally surprised at the the end, there was like a major twist. Pick up this book.

Also: Being the nerd I am, I went to barnesandnoble.com, into their book forum, and their book club, and I registered, and I went to look at the posts on the Child 44 list, and I found that the author started his own little bulletin, and people can ask questions and comment on the book. And he replied to every one of the posts on there. And I was so amazed by that, and I posted my own, and I'm anxiously awaiting a reply, because I cannot wait to hear directly from Tom Smith.

So for real, if you're looking for a good page-turner, summer read, quick read, pick up Child 44. You will not regret this decision.

Oh, yeah, actually: If you are a bit squeamish, or very squeamish about violent descriptions, you might want to censor yourself before picking this up, because there are some gruesome scenes that are totally uncensored. But otherwise this book is excellent--ten out of ten, five stars, love it! [Holds two thumbs up.]

I don't mean to make light of the person who filmed this video blog---pressed to say something into a video camera about a book I really like, I doubt I'd be much more articulate. (Granted, I'll never write the words "ten out of ten, five stars, love it!"---guess that's what Hogan means about my kind being "detached.") But we've always lived in a world where people hear personalized enthusiastic recommendations and read ruminative, thoughful reviews, and I don't see why one has to do battle with the other. The main litblogger complaint about the TBR is that's it's become dumbed-down a focused on mainstream releases---following the lead of a two-thumbs-up reader hoisting a bestseller in front of a video camera doesn't seem like a particularly useful path.