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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...