The culture Web site PopMatters has just launched a fun enterprise, inviting various writers to write essays on the used bookstore. It's a brilliant idea, given how transformative a place it can be for young readers and writers---if you're any sort of serious reader under 25, you're probably too broke to drop $25 on a new hardback (or even $14 on a new paperback), and libraries can be understocked with a lot of more obscure stuff. As a teenager, used bookstores are where I learned about a lot of major authors, took fliers on lots of not-so-major ones, and generally started building my library. I doubt I paid more than a quarter for my copy of Paul Fussell's Class, probably the most important book I read in my teen years.

But more than just being a repository of cheap books, used bookstores are unusual repositories of intimate information about readers. Diane Leach's lovely contribution to the PopMatters series gets at some of this, discussing some of the odd bits of arcana she's discovered in her used-book purchases. Leach writes:

Written on the flyleaf of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

August 1989-For Joan-With so much love and thanks-you are a rare and vital friend-Mary.

But Joan didn't keep the book. What happened? Perhaps Joan died, or found the writing life impossible. Perhaps she came to despise Mary.

When I picked up Janet Fitch's White Oleander, a sheaf of snapshots fell out, family photographs of total strangers. They're still tucked in the book. It seems wrong to throw them away.

Critics often don't get many reminders that books are very intimate things for many readers. I get plenty of free books, fresh and new, while most readers have to agonize over buying a new book, regardless of how much money they're free to spend. I'm often tasked with getting through a book in a matter of days before I have to leap into the next one; most readers stick with books for weeks if not months, the two becoming close travel companions. (By comparison, critics are sleazy---we have lots of flings and one-night stands.) That may speak to the most important element of the used bookstore---the way that it reminds us of why reading is worthwhile in the first place, not just for the knowledge we gain but from the emotional relationships we build.

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.

The act of reading, as a general rule, isn't exactly action-packed. Much of my reading is done in pretty unexciting circumstances---usually sitting at home or sitting on the train. One reading experience flows into the other, so I'd have to think a little bit before I'd recall what book I was reading exactly two weeks ago.

But about three years ago, I clearly remember taking a Green Line train into downtown Chicago when the poor guy sitting directly across from me was senselessly punched in the head by a man getting off the train. The guy delivering the punches got away without being confronted, the guy who got punched was OK (though understandably stunned), and I remember exactly what I was reading there: Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu.

Until Bookslut tipped me off to it, I had no idea that Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based ad and design firm, has a series called Field-Tested Books, in which various authors are asked to write brief essays about their experiences reading a specific book in a specific place. This year's collection is filled with some excellent writers---among them Steve Almond (on Rick DeMarinis' The Voice of America), Andrei Codrescu (on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano), and Ben Greenman (Kathy Acker's Bodies of Work). It's fun to flip through online, but if you want to throw some money behind it, you'd be supporting a good cause: If you buy the book version of the essays, Coudal will make a donation to First Book, which donates books to underprivileged kids.

My favorite essay in the collection is by Joe Meno, a fine Chicago writer who wound up writing about two things that have had a strong influence on me growing up---Chicago's Red Line, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Meno summarizes the book's power beautifully:

The people on the Red Line could be pretty grotesque. Not ugly, not disgusting, but a little too real, a little too human. The old black man who ate cashews and spit the empty shells at his feet. The child with the white bandage over his right eye and a bruise on his cheek. The Latina woman, just about my mother's age, who handed me a Kleenex because my nose was running.

Once the El train doors parted, once I found an empty seat, checked to be sure there was no feces, human or otherwise, beneath it, and opened the dog-eared copy I had not bothered to return yet to the library, the clatter and clangor of the train jostling beneath the metropolis, beneath the skyscrapers and busy multitudes above suddenly faded away. What remained was a way of looking, a way of moving about the world, a way of seeing people, as frightening, as unfamiliar as they might seem, as both odd, necessary, and lovely.

Spend any amount of time looking at statistics about reading and books, and it's easy to get confused. Americans aren't reading as much as they used to---to a degree that's somewhere between disheartening and catastrophic, depending on who you ask. But more books than ever are being published. The Literary Saloon points out that, according to one recent study, more than 50,000 novels were published in the United States last year, more than double the amount published five years prior.

Who's reading all of this new bounty, if anybody? There's no clear answer to that question. What the Literary Saloon is more concerned about is why these books aren't actually getting reviewed:

So for example The New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus: in 2004 it already seemed dubious (to us) that he excused the lack of fiction coverage at the NYTBR by claiming: "There's a lot more nonfiction published these days than there used to be" -- but certainly he now should face the fact (and the facts, in terms of raw numbers) that if that was true then the tide has turned -- in a big, big way.
But after the 25 May issue (ratio of fiction titles to non-fiction titles that get their own full-length review 1:5 !) they offer their 1 June 'Summer Reading' issue -- and provide only three (3) reviews of fiction titles and nineteen (19 !) reviews each devoted to an individual non-fiction title, as well as four reviews each devoted to several works of non-fiction. What world are they living in ?

I don't study the NYTBR with that much vigor, and I don't know enough about Tanenhaus to speculate much about his thinking. But I might guess that, like most editors at newspapers these days, he's trying to balance out the goal of comprehensiveness against shrinking space. And that space isn't just lost in the book section---it's lost in the news sections as well, which might make covering nonfiction books on global affairs somewhat more appealing. After all, the book review may be the only space where you can engage with international politics with any depth.

To lose fiction coverage in the midst of that is disheartening, to be sure; I know for my part that I wish that every week's book review section in the Times or the Washington Post did better than rounding up the biggest books from the larger publishing houses. But fixing the problem won't involve proportioning space based on statistics about how many books get published. Major book review sections may feel obligated to bring the news, and with shrinking staffs it's harder to dedicate energy to weed out the good stuff from the stacks of books coming from small presses or via POD. But the best rebuke to that failing isn't to sit and wait for those places to come around to your way of thinking. You have to make the noise yourself.

Some of that work is already being done---not least by the likes of the Literary Saloon. And if those numbers are right, there's room for plenty more. If there's a market for the books, there is, somewhere, a market for smart reviewers to tell readers about them.

You're a writer. You've just published a book---one you're proud of, worked hard on, and are happy to see out in the world. Then some critic shows up to smash it to bits. What do you do? One thing you're told not to do is respond. Not only does it make you look unseemly in the literary world (and it's a small one, remember), it's a losing battle---rare is the critic who publicly reverses his or her opinion, and rarer still is the critic who does so under pressure from an artist. Last month, Mark Sarvas' debut novel, Harry, Revised, was all but napalmed in the New York Times Book Review, but his response was acknowledgement with restraint. "There's plenty of literary news beyond the Times," he noted on his blog; the closest he got to public crankiness was telling the Los Angeles Times that "I do wish they'd assigned someone with some literary gravitas." (Just as an aside, I'm not sure what convinces Sarvas that he deserved it; he has a serious rep as a literary blogger, but his novel is fairly lightweight---the rom-com adaptation isn't hard to imagine.) (See what happens when you grouse in public about your review? Even if you do it politely?)

There are some signs that the critic-writer divide is cracking somewhat. Last year Tova Reich found a way to snap back at the Times reviewer of her novel My Holocaust. And today Harper's critic-blogger Wyatt Mason directs readers to a lengthy letter that Philip Roth wrote to the magazine, complaining about a critic's treatment of his 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint.

Roth didn't send the letter, which he later included in an essay collection; one of his stated reasons for not putting it in a mailbox was that, "It is unlikely that the critic is about to have his reading corrected by the novelist anyway." But Mason thinks that Roth should've sent it along. Serious engagements between writers and critics, where writers point out what their intentions are and clarifies what his or her intent is, only makes literary culture more transparent. "[M]y sense remains that not only can one dispute taste without sounding defensive but, when driven to it by what one deems critical stupidity, one must," Mason writes.

I appreciate Mason's advice, as far as it goes. And Roth points to a certain unfairness in the vow of silence in his intro to the unsent letter, noting that critics "generally finds himself in the comfortable position of a prosecution witness who, having given his testimony, need not face cross-examination by the defense." But it still begs the question of what posture a writer can take that wouldn't sound defensive. Is Roth's detailed discussion of rhetoric and the role of the novelist appropriate? Is Reich's more comic approach better? In both cases, it feels like wasted energy; a spirited discussion among critics is a healthy thing, but if I writer I'm interested is mad at how he or she is reviewed, I'd rather not see a public squabble. I'd just prefer to know that they're working on their next book.