For details, please visit: http://lowcountryrwa.com/online-workshops/#FEB

This will be a group workshop. If you’re interested in an individual workshop, please visit my workshop page for details.

Happy New Year!

1) I know a lot more now than I did then and have lived, read, and synthesized enough that I can combine lots of distinct things into unique stories that share non-obvious thins about the world. When I started, I couldn’t do that. Now my skills have broadened substantially, and, as a result, I write on different topics.

2) For many writers, reviewing books for a couple years is extremely useful because it introduces a wide array of narratives, styles, and so forth, forcing you to develop, express, and justify your opinions if you’re going to write anything worthwhile. Few other environments force you to do this; in academia, the books you’re assigned are already supposed to be “great,” so you’re not asked to say if they’re crap—even though many of the assigned books in school are crap, you’re not supposed to say so. After going through dozens or hundreds of books and explaining why you think they’re good and bad and in between, you should end up developing at least a moderately coherent philosophy of what you like, why you like it, and, ideally, how you should implement it. You shouldn’t let that philosophy become a set of blinders, but it does help to think systematically about tastes and preferences and so forth.

You might not be saying much about the books you’re reviewing, but you are saying a lot about what you’ve come to think about books.

3) No one cares about book reviews. If people in the aggregate did care about book reviews, virtually every newspaper in the country wouldn’t have shuttered what book review section it once had. What a limited number of people do want to know is what books they should read and, to a lesser extent, why. Having established, I’d like to imagine, some level of credibility by going through 2), above, I think I’m better able to do this now than I was when I started, and without necessarily dissecting every aspect of every book.

It’s also very hard and time consuming to write a great review, at least for me.

Lev Grossman also points out a supply / demand issue in an interview:

There was a time not long ago when opinions about books were a scarce commodity. Now we have an extreme surplus of opinions about books, and it’s very easy to obtain them. So if you’re in the business of supplying opinions about books, you need to get into a slightly different business. Being a critic becomes much more about supplying context for books, talking about new ways of reading, sharing ways in which it can be a rich experience.

He’s right, and his economic perspective is useful: when something is plentiful, easy to produce, and thus cheap, we should do something else. And I’m doing more of the “something else,” using as my model writers like Derek Sivers and Paul Graham.

To return to Grossman’s point, we might also treat what we’re doing differently. Clay Shirky says in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes scarce, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of the value is tied to its scarcity.

Lots of people are writing lots of reviews, some of them good (I like to think some of mine are good) but most not. Most are just impressionistic or empty or garbage. By now, opinions are plentiful, which means we should probably shift towards greater understanding and knowledge production instead of raw opinion. That’s what I’m doing in point 1). I’m no longer convinced that book reviews are automatically to be regarded “as valuable in [themselves],” as they might’ve been when it was quite hard to get ahold of books and opinions about those books. Today, for any given book, you can type its name into Google and find dozens or hundreds of reviews. This might make pointing out lesser known but good books useful—which I did with Never the Face: A Story of Desire—and the New York Review of Books is doing on a mass scale with its publishing imprint. Granted, I’ve found few books in that series I’ve really liked aside from The Dud Avocado, but I pay attention to the books published by it.

4) It’s useful to keep When To Ignore Criticism (and How to Get People to Take Your Critique Seriously) by John Scalzi in mind; he says critics tend to have four major functions: consumer reporting, exegesis, instruction, and polemic (details at his site). The first is useful but easily found across the web, and it’s also of less and less use to me because deciding what’s “worth it” is so personal, like style. My tastes these days are much more refined and specific than they were, say, 10 years ago (and I suspect they’ll be more refined still in 10 years). The second is basically what academic articles do, and I’d rather do that for money, however indirectly. The third is still of interest to me, and I do it sometimes, especially with bad reviews. The fourth is a toss-up.

When I started, I mostly wanted to do one and two. Now I’m not that convinced they’re important. In addition, books that I really love and really think are worth reading don’t come along all that frequently; maybe I should make a list of them at the top. Every week, there’s an issue of the New York Times Book Review with a book on the cover, but that doesn’t mean every week brings a fabulous book very much much worth reading by a large number of people. Having been fooled by cover stories a couple of times (Angelology being the most salient example), I’m much warier of them now.

Unfortunately, academic writing is also usually less fun, less intelligent, more windy, and duller than writing on the Internet. Anything is accomplishes rhetorically or intellectually is usually done through a film of muck thrown on by the culture of academic publishing, peer reviewers, and journal editors. There’s a very good reason no one outside of academia reads academic literary criticism, although I hadn’t appreciated why until I began to read it.

5) Professionalization. To spend the time and energy writing the great review for this blog, I necessarily have to give up time that I would otherwise spend writing stuff for grad school. There could conceivably be tangible financial rewards from publishing literary criticism, however abstruse or little read. There are not such rewards in blogging, at least given academia’s current structural equilibrium.

(If you’re going to argue that this equilibrium is bad and the game is dumb, that’s a fine thing to do, but it’s also the subject for another day.)

6) People, including me, care more about books than book reviews. I’m better off spending more time writing fiction and less time writing about fiction. So I do that, even if the labors are not yet evident. A book might, conceivably, be important and read for a long period of time. Book reviews, on the other hand, seldom are. So I want to work toward the more important activity; instead of telling you what I think is good, I’d rather just do it.

Here’s T.C. Boyle o:

What I’d like to see more of are the sort of wide-ranging and penetrating overviews of a given writer’s work by writers and thinkers who are the equals of those they presume to analyze. This happens rarely. Why? Well, what’s in it for the critic? Is he/she going to be paid? By whom? Harper’s runs in-depth book essays, as does the New York Review of Books and other outlets. Fine and dandy. There would be more if there were more of an audience. But there isn’t.

For a long time, I did it free, though perhaps not at the level Boyle would desire; now I don’t, per the professionalization issue.

7) A great deal of art and art criticism does, in the end, reduce to taste, and the opinions and analyses of critics are basically votes that, over time, accumulate and lift some few works out of history’s ocean. But I’m not sure that book reviews are the optimal means of performing that work: better to do it by alluding to older work in newer work, or integrating ideas into more considered essays, or otherwise use artistic work in some larger synthesis.

8) In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Norrell is having a debate with two toadies and says, “I really have no desire to write reviews of other people’s books. Modern publications upon magic are the most pernicious things in the world, full of misinformation and wrong opinions.” Lascelles, who has become a kind of self-appointed, high-status servant, says:

[I]t is precisely by passing judgements upon other people’s work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one’s own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one’s theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.

And because everybody else does it, we should do it too. Modern publications about literature probably feel the same as Norrell’s view of 1807 publications of magic, because it’s hard to tell what constitutes true information and right opinions in literature—making it seem that everyone else’s writing is “full of misinformation and wrong opinions.” (Norrell, of course, things he can right this, and in the context of the novel he may be right.) Besides, even if we are confronted by facts we don’t agree with, we tend to ignore them:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite.

Opinions are probably much the same, which explains how we get to where we are. Opinions about books even more so, which is how Lev Grossman came to say what he said above.

Anyway, Norrell realizes that book reviewing is often a waste of time, and Lascelles likes book reviewing not because of its intrinsic merit but because he thinks of it as high status (which it might’ve been in 1807). In 2011 or 2012, reviewing books might still be a waste of time and is a much lower status activity, so that even the Lascelles of the world–who I’ve met—are unlikely to be drawn to it.

As I said above, the best review of a book isn’t a review of it, but another book that speaks back to it, or incorporates its ideas, or disagrees with it, or uses it as a starting point. Which isn’t a book review at all, of course: It’s something more special, and more rare. So I’m more interested now in doing that kind of review, like Norrell is interested in doing magic instead of writing about other people’s opinions of doing magic, rather than writing about whether a book is worth reading or not. I’ll still do that to some extent, but I’ve been drifting away for some time and am likely to do so further. If Lev Grossman is remembered beyond his lifetime, I doubt it will be for his criticism, however worthy it might be: he’ll be remembered for The Magicians and his other literary work. I’d like to follow his example.

EDIT: Here’s Henry Bech in The Complete Henry Bech:

That a negative review might be a fallible verdict, delivered in haste, against a deadline, for a few dollars, by a writer with problems and limitations of his own was a reasonable and weaseling supposition he could no longer, in the dignity of his years, entertain.

Yet this is the supposition artists need to entertain; critics’ opinions are as cacophonous and random as a jungle, and listening to them is hard, and, the writers who react most vituperatively to critics are probably doing so because they fear the critic or critics might be right.

Updike is also writing close to home here: the better known the writer, the more critics he’s naturally going to attract. So the volume of critical attacks might also be linked to success.

1. View marketing your book(s) via book blogs as developing professional relationships.  Book bloggers are people too.  Most of us do this as a hobby due to our love of reading.  We can tell when an author or publisher views us as a tool.  Take some time to get to know us by browsing our blogs, clicking through to our twitter or facebook or flickr, etc…  Friend us on GoodReads or LibraryThing.  Trust me.  I can tell from the pitch email if the author/publisher has taken the time to do this or not.
2. Read the review polices before submitting and obey them.  Most established book bloggers have a set of review policies somewhere on their site, either under contact information or on a dedicated page.  Take the time to look at and read these.  We post them to make everything smoother for everybody.  For instance, on mine I say I do not accept YA.  You may read this and think, “Oh, but mine isn’t like other YA books, I’ll submit it anyway and tell her that.”  No. Do not do that.  Trust me when I say, I do not like YA.  I avoid it. Yours is not special. You are not a unique snowflake.  And besides, why are you wasting your time submitting to someone who already has an aversion to your genre?  The beauty of book blogs is they let you seek out and find your own niche audiences.  The review policies help with that.
3. Do not pitch a book to us in the comments unless the blogger specifically states she prefers that.  Most established book bloggers have a blog email or a submission form that they use to sort out the ARC pitches, since we really do get a lot of them.  Comments are for interacting with our own readers, not for you to pitch your book.
4. Find out our name we go by on our blog and use it in the pitch email.  The only thing more insulting than getting pitched a book that we obviously wouldn’t want if the person had read our review policies is if they start the email by saying “Dear blogger.”  Unless my name on the site is “blogger,” don’t call me that!  Our names are usually pretty obvious if you take five seconds to browse our blogs.  For instance, on mine on the right-hand sidebar there is both a Creative Commons license with my name on it and my twitter handle, which is my name.  If you can’t take the time to address us by name, why should we take the time to read your book?
5. Do not contact bloggers until you have the final copy that you want reviewed ready to send out.  I encountered this problem multiple times in 2011 when reviewing ARCs.  Either the author would send me a copy then send me another copy months later saying, “Oh, this is the newly edited version” or when I posted my review the author would say, “But it’s different now!”  We agree to review the copy you send us.  That’s it.  It is not our obligation to seek out new edits.  Do not submit a book to us that you are not 100% positive is the absolutely positively best you can do.  I know it’s exciting to have finished the first draft of your book, but editing is your friend.  Nothing puts a reviewer in a worse frame of mind than a book badly in need of editing and no amount of you saying “But it’s different now” will entice us to change your review.  This is viral, indie marketing.  Use it to your advantage and don’t send out ARCs until you are positive it is the best you can offer.
6. State in your pitch email exactly what format of ARCs you can offer.  This again is a time-saving technique that shows respect for the book blogger.  I personally accept kindle format, pdf, and print books, but I hate having to email back to a pitch and ask exactly what format is being offered, especially since I don’t like giving out my mailing address unless it’s for a reason.  It will take you a few seconds to type out a sentence saying what formats you have to offer.  Doing this will generate more positivity between you and the blogger.
7. Provide the book jacket blurb of the book in the pitch email and do not include praise for your work unless someone super famous has said it.  Really. We just want to know what the book is about.  We do not care how much praise your work has gotten unless one of our own favorite authors has said so.  (For instance, I instantly accept anything Stephen King has praised).  I know that it’s awesome your first book got a lot of praise, and that’s great for you!  But we don’t care.  This again goes back to respecting that the book blogger knows what she likes.  Tell us the genre and give us the blurb and maybe throw in one or two really awesome praises you’ve received, but that’s it. Seriously.
8. Compare your work (if it’s true and applicable) to other books the reviewer has read and loved.  This shows us that you paid attention to our blog and creates a positive association in our minds between you and a favorite book or author.
9. Include links in your email signature to your blog, GoodReads/LibraryThing presence, twitter, etc…  Not all bloggers will look at this, but some of us will and sometimes it will lead to an acceptance of an ARC that otherwise might not have been accepted.  It’s smart marketing for you and convenient for the blogger.
10. Once the blogger accepts an ARC, send the copy immediately and thank them for their time.  If you are mailing a print copy, email them telling them exactly when you put it in the mail and thank them.  If you are sending a coupon code or a file attachment, also be sure to thank them in the email.
11. When the review goes live, do not disagree with it in public.  This all comes down to being mature.  Everyone gets bad reviews, even the famous authors.  It’s gonna happen if you market your book.  But responding aggressively to a negative review either in the comments or via email just makes you look like a childish jerk. Every time.  Be graceful and thank the blogger for her time.  That’s it.  If your work is good, one or two negative reviews are not going to kill it.  Now, if the blogger got a detail wrong, like a character’s name or who published the book, by all means politely correct her, but do so via email.  You clearly have it, and it shows respect for the blogger by not embarrassing her in public.  Most of us will be grateful to you for pointing out the mistake!
12. If the blogger liked your book, maintain the rapport and relationship.  I honestly hate it when I love a first book in the series and the author doesn’t offer me ARCs of the rest of them.  You have found a reader who likes you and has an audience to spread that love of your work to.  Why wouldn’t you offer more ARCs to her in the future?  Some of my best professional book blogging relationships are with authors or agents whose first pitch I loved who then proceeded to continue to offer me more books.  I want to like the books I read and review just as much as you want me to.  After one positive experience, why wouldn’t you keep that positive rapport going?

Before I close I just want to give a few examples of the types of pitches and interactions that worked really well on me as a blogger in 2011:

• “In addition to the obvious wolf connection, judging by what you discuss on your blog, I think you would enjoy it.”
• ” I would be happy to add you to the list to receive a review copy once they are available.”
• “It’s great to meet you. I just read your review, and thank you so much for all the kind words.”
• “Let me know if you’d like to review the sequels. I’ll be happy to send them to you.”
• “Thanks again for your honest and evenhanded review.” (in response to a negative review)
• “I’m not ‘technically’ self-pubbed, but the publisher I work with consists of about 3 people on staff and have released a total of 5 books which mine is the only one released by them that isn’t written by people who work there.” (I accidentally said a book was self-pubbed when it was indie pubbed)
• “Thanks again for reviewing. YOU ROCK MY SOCKS OFF! SERIOUSLY!”

You can see from these samples that all of these authors and publishers treated me like a person, thanked me for my work, and were personable themselves.

I really hope you find the tips helpful in your endeavors to market your books! Viva la reading!

Markers

Colt begins by making the claim that Jesus has “markers.”

“You mean like the ones you color with Colt?”

“Ya, Dad.”

“Well Colt, where are these markers?”

Colt then places both hands, palms up and points to the palm of his right hand and then his left.

“Why would you have something against this Stephen?  Jesus had piercings in his hands from the nails.”   Yes, this is exactly what John 20 shows when Thomas says he won’t believe until he places his finger into the mark of the nails.  The problem is not with the nail prints, the problem is with the location of the nail prints.  Historically the hand was known to be up to midway up the arm.  Thus, Jesus would not have been pierced in his palms, but instead, he would have been pierced in his wrist.  This is biblical and historical for two reasons.  First, had Jesus been pierced in his palm he would have slipped off of the nails because his palms could not support his weight.  Second, the bones in Jesus’s hands would have been broken and this would have gone against the fulfillment of the scriptures.

Halos

Ya, dad.  Everyone in heaven has lights around their head.”

These lights are supposed to be halos.  These halos are the kinds depicted in Touched by an Angel when Roma Downey quotes her most famous lines “I am an angel, sent by God.”  This doesn’t make sense to me for a couple of reasons.  First, is that did not come into Christian art until the 3rd or 4th century and is started with Christ and eventually made it to all the saints.  Second, if God’s glory is the source of all light, and halos can be seen, wouldn’t this mean that the glory of the halos would outshine the glory of God?  I know that this could be a non sequitur argument, but the argument can still be made.  I don’t know how bright the glory of God is, but if it shines so brightly that there is no shadow, how could one see a halo?

Pearls

“Ya Dad. The gates were gold and they had pearls on them.”

This could be a misquote on behalf of the father, but because it was in the book, I have to take it as what Colt actually told his dad.  The problem with this statement is that it goes against Revelation 21:21.  ”And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl”  [emphasis mine].  This verse shows that the gates did not have pearls (plural) but a pearl (singular).  This is in opposition to what the Bible clearly says about Heaven.  So why would God show Colt multiple pearls on a gate, but show John that the gates had one pearl?  The answer is obvious, he didn’t.

Conclusion

Now to be honest, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.  Heave is for Real, but we shouldn’t rest on the “experience” of a kid.  Instead, we should open our Bibles and read for ourselves what the Word of God says.  God’s word is the final authority and so to save time and heartache, it might just be best to pick up a book that speaks on what the Bible says about Heaven and not a kid.  In my opinion, Heaven by Randy Alcorn is a much better choice.  He uses scripture (in context) to back up everything that is said.  Heaven is not something he experienced, but something that he’s studied;  not from a kid, but from the Bible.

Here’s the review in question. It runs to 900 words. The first 300 words comprise a summary of Didion’s previous book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which is a precursor to Blue Nights. The next 150 words comprise a summary of the circumstances in which Didion published The Year of Magical Thinking, the difficult months following the death of her daughter Quintana, which now occupy the foreground of Blue Nights. At this halfway point of the review, however, Riemer still hasn’t mentioned Blue Nights itself: Quintana’s death is folded into his coverage of The Year of Magical Thinking. Only after 550 words does he mention that Blue Nights is “an account of the illness and death of Quintana” — that’s after he expresses moral misgivings about The Year of Magical Thinking and after he discusses its stage adaptation — and then, almost two-thirds of the way into his review, he devotes only one paragraph to a description and evaluation of the book he is reviewing. At 154 words, it makes up just seventeen per cent of the entire review:

Didion’s skill is as evident in her new book as it was six years ago when she was working on The Year of Magical Thinking. The form and style are identical. This account of Quintana’s death, coming as it did at a time when Dunne’s sudden death was still raw and immediate, is surrounded by Didion’s memories: her marriage; the years during which the couple worked on screenplays; Quin-tana’s childhood; the fate of relatives, friends and their children. A few details glossed over in the earlier book are highlighted here, particularly the fact that Quintana was an adopted child — this is only hinted at in The Year of Magical Thinking. There is, in addition, a new note sounded here: the panic of old age, the suspicion that both body and mind are decaying, the awareness that the familiar life — the people you had known and loved — has come to an end.

In my experience with book reviews and book reports, there are three key flaws that suggest that a writer hasn’t actually read the book they’re writing about.

First: an absence of quotes from the book itself. Despite his remarks on “Didion’s skill” and on “[t]he form and style” of Blue Nights, Riemer does not use even one of his 900 words to quote Didion so that she might speak for herself, relying instead on paraphrasing and summarisation.

Second: a disproportionate focus on authorial biography and historical context, combined with a tendency towards contextual repetition, at the expense of a focus on the book. One-third of Riemer’s review of Blue Nights is a summary of The Year of Magical Thinking. One-third of the review is a summary of the context in which that book was published and adapted. Of the remaining one-third, half consists of the paragraph quoted above and half consists of Riemer’s repeated misgivings about Didion’s work combined with his repeated acknowledgement of her stylistic gifts. “[S]peaking here personally,” he writes, “I think the choice [to write publicly about the death of her husband John in The Year of Magical Thinking] was questionable.” “As I have said,” he continues, “Didion’s skill, sensitivity and intelligence go some way towards redeeming this book. …  I cannot, however, banish my sense of uneasiness.” Didion is a brave and stylistically skillful writer but her choice of subject matter makes Riemer uneasy: he repeats this notion three times in his review. Whether the stirring of such uneasiness might be part of Didion’s aesthetic project in Blue Nights — whether she is carefully preying on some innate voyeurism in her readers in a way that calls attention to it — doesn’t seem to occur to Riemer, much less to add complexity to his existing moral misgivings.

Third: factual errors which suggest that the writer has relied on his or her memory of an event rather than consulting a record of it. Riemer, as quoted above, has this to say of the adoption of Quintana: “A few details glossed over in the earlier book are highlighted here, particularly the fact that Quintana was an adopted child — this is only hinted at in The Year of Magical Thinking.” Now here’s Didion “hint[ing] at” Quintana’s adoption, at the end of chapter ten of The Year of Magical Thinking, although I’d call it a lot more than just a hint:

In 1964 and 1965, when we were living in the gate house with the beach and the peacocks but could not afford even to tip the parking boys at restaurants, let alone eat in them, John and I used to park on the street on Canon and charge dinner at The Bistro. We took Quintana there on the day of her adoption, when she was not quite seven months old. They had given us Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette and placed her carrier on the table, a centrepiece. At the courthouse that morning she had been the only baby, even the only child; all the other adoptions that day had seemed to involve adults adopting one another for tax reasons.

Other flaws are added spice. Didion’s career as an esteemed essayist and political analyst falls by the wayside — you’d never know from Riemer’s review that she has written anything other than screenplays and The Year of Magical Thinking – and the last word goes not to Didion, nor even to anyone writing about Didion, but to Ludwig Wittgenstein, halfheartedly invoked. Riemer’s review of Blue Nights offers no sense of Blue Nights beyond the barest consideration of its subject and the fact that Riemer is unsettled by it. You won’t get a taste of Didion’s own words; you’ll only get an overlong survey of The Year of Magical Thinking and a factually erroneous one at that. The whole review smacks of the sense that this writer has written about a book that he has only read about, rather than a book that he has read directly and with care.

It’s possible that Riemer wrote something closer to 1,500 words before some senseless editor axed the better part of his review and ripped out a fistful of Didion quotes for good measure. For Riemer’s sake, I certainly hope that’s the case, not that the rest of us would be any better off. This sort of review does a disservice to everyone associated with it: Didion’s work isn’t given the respect of careful consideration, readers who may or may not turn to that work are not given any sense of it, Riemer looks a fool for attaching his name to something so underdeveloped, and the Sydney Morning Herald tarnishes its own prestige by pretending that this sort of writing deserves a place in a paper of record. Can’t Australia do better than this?

There are no babies chewing their way out of wombs in the episode, but there is talk of:

Frozen Planet
Riverdance
fun with magnesium
Scooby Doo: talk show host
Sammy Davis Jr vs. Jimmy Constable from 911
Akon vs. Shakespeare
flapjacks vs. fun cakes
Scrappy Doo vs. Scampi
candles vs. ‘wax-filled tins’
Sophie Wilcox
scaring off the Mongol army
The Works
Mario Balotelli
the scent of Jelly Belly
and
medical circumcision.

Plus: [Olly] Mann cannot live on raw cake-mix alone; Helen did not spend her childhood in the back of the wardrobe with Aslan; and Martin the Sound Man wishes the whole world was scented with synthetic rhubarb.

This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available on iPhone, iPad or Android) is a treatise on Movember, starting with Martin’s recent facial deforestation, and ending up at Craig David’s current career choice, via Robert Mugabe and Halle Berry, because where else could such a discussion possibly go?

Next week’s episode is going nowhere without your QUESTIONS, so send them in: leave voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877, Skype answermethis) or write emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.

See you next Thursday,

Helen & Olly

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The Last Hustle, by Kenny Johnson, as told to Shanti Einolander

As Real As It Gets

by Jerry Katz

Most books in the genre of spiritual awakening focus on the claims of the awakened state: “There is only consciousness (or God, love, awareness),” and so on. They invite the reader to see things as they are, not as they appear to be.

Sometimes an awakened author will speak about life before awakening, but not so often since it is seen as less than enlightened to appear as though attached to memories.

Rarely will the author reveal the shadow side that lurks after awakening: the unpretty impulses that continue to stir and surface.

However, Kenny Johnson tells it all. The Last Hustle is about life before awakening, awakening itself, and life after awakening. What is most valuable about this book is the distinction between the perception of things before awakening and that perception after.

Life before awakening was a loveless childhood, thieving, pimping, violence and years in prisons. With a firm grip on your arm he takes you into the bowels of places you would rather not go. But the grip is purposeful and you know where this journey is going.

His awakening itself was, like all awakenings, unique. It was prepared by remembered things spoken to him by his mother and aunt. It was developed by exposure in prisons to meditation, Yoga, Buddhism, the Black Israelites, and various conscious and intelligent men including a caring guard. It culminated in a connection with Gangaji and it — the awakening — happened when she visited his prison.

Life afterward was radically different:

“It is really humbling to come from the streets as one who brought destruction to everyone he met and now to find myself trying to bring as much love as possible to all whom I meet.”

“Just as I had come from the lineage of Iceberg Slim, The Magnificent Seven, Fillmore Slim, Minnesota Bob, and Sly Ryan, now I was in the lineage of Ramana, Papaji, and Gangaji.”

Though he would never return to crime after his final release from prison in 1997, Johnson still had to face episodes of anger, alcoholism, drug abuse, and their roots in poor self-esteem. He clearly shows that life after awakening includes directly looking at these arisings. Nor have shadow issues ceased in his life. He writes:

“I don’t know what a final awakening will mean for me, but I do know that Kenny Johnson is a far better and more content human being whose greatest desire now is to serve that awakening. He is no longer hustling and thieving, beating on women or giving the judicial system hell. He gets up each day and makes an intention to live a life of peace as best as he can and to try to guide others to do the same. Yet he’s also mindful and respectful that any moment he could re-experience all of the old anger, sadness, mistrust, delusion, and denial of the truth of his being.”

Often painful, often loving and spacious, The Last Hustle chronicles a full life and transmits a palpable sense that love is here and now and that it demands you face your life here and now. The Last Hustle is as real as spiritual books get.

Kenny Johnson has returned to prisons as an educator and spiritual guide through his organization This Sacred Space. His journey is highly worth experiencing.

The Last Hustle, by Kenny Johnson, as told to Shanti Einolander

Reviewing anything creative whether its a book, movie, restaurant, art etc. is not as easy a task as it sounds. One can always hear people speak about the pain, energy and time they have spend on making a movie or writing a book or even readying a work of art. And once they finish, they look for people to review the same. Obviously you would want famous bloggers, columnists, writers to review your work so that more and more people get to know what you have achieved. But then there is a catch to it. You would always want people to talk good things about you, wouldn’t you? So how far can you go to ensure that?

Since I love writing more of book reviews in particular, this particular post deals with book reviews. Over the last two years, I have written quite a few book reviews. My book choices traverse different genres from thrillers to documentarys to the usual college rom – coms. But none of my reviews have become as famous as the recent one on Chetan Bhagat’s “Revolution 2020″

http://aseemrastogi2.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/book-review-revolution-2020/

I wouldn’t dwelve on the reasons for its popularity but instead move onto the more interesting topic of what happened after the dust settled on the increasing number of htis and comments. I got a mail from someone for reviewing a few books since he liked my review. Seeing it I was happy as any blogger would be, thinking that people had liked my post so much so that they were asking me to write reviews for their book agency. I agreed but had just one condition before starting out. And after I mailed the condition, there hasn’t been a reply for more than 2 odd weeks now.

The condition -

“As you can see, all my reviews are unbiased. If I think something isn’t that good, I wouldn’t think before saying it.”

Not getting any response after this didn’t anger me or something. It just brought a few facts in my head and also gave rise to a few questions. 

Could he have thought of paying me (although he didn’t) to get positive reviews? Has writing been reduced to such a meaningless exercise that people can’t accept negative reviews? Can’t you call a spade a spade?

Reviewers are mostly not paid at all or are paid peanuts unless you are a Taran Adarsh or a Mayank Shekhar. I personally don’t recall any names of book reviewers. And obviously as you would have guessed by now, book reviewing is a thankless job. If you review negatively say for a famous newspaper / magazine, your review may not be accepted, the author may fume or you may never get a chance to write for that newspaper / magazine ever again.

But then on the other hand if you write a negative review for a blog which not many read, no one would bother at all. Similarly a positive review would generate great publicity everywhere particularly from the author but still earn brickbats from literary critics who may say that the author has bought you. As you may have guessed by now, book reviewing is a thankless job.

Reviewing books has been an honourable activity over the years according to me. But with the exponential growth in the number of authors, some people are making it appear a commercial sham.

PS – On another note I had responded to a mailer by Bookchums asking for book reviews and they are ready to accept my unbiased reviews.

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and theirselves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and to read. 

“The  bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so is. But there are times when the critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, to new creations. The ‘new’ need friends…

“Not everyone can become a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere…”

I don’t think critiquing someone’s book is “easy”, really. Not with my personality type. I’m a peace-keeper (phlegmatic). I don’t like to risk hurting anyone’s feelings. Hence why I say that I don’t ’thrive’ on negative criticism: writing it, or reading it. I cringe at that sort of thing, actually.

Sure, writing a negative review might come a little easier out of the pen, if only because there’s more passion behind the words you are writing; that passion inspired you to spill what you’re feeling. Whereas, sometimes when you really like something, it’s hard to find the right words to convey exactly what the thing made you feel.

No, reviewing — being a book “critic” — isn’t easy. It’s a fine line we reviewers must walk between sharing our opinions, while respecting that the authors put their heart & soul into their work.

I also read to review. I enjoy participating in Thomas Nelson’s BookSneeze program where bloggers receive a free book, read it, and both blog about it on their site and post a commercial review. I’m also a part of many Litfuse Publicity Group blog tours so I do the same thing with them as BookSneeze. Although it is relaxing and fun this form of reading feels like it is in a category of its own.

Most readers do so for the fun of it. It’s a hobby, relaxing, an escape, and sparks our imagination like nothing else. This is my favorite aspect but the more I write, the less I read for fun. My escape is fiction, mostly contemporary romance, but anything geared for women is game.  I learned something earlier this year when I picked up a couple books for escape and found something completely different:

The books made me look inward at my past and what issues I was stuffing. By the end of those reads I enjoyed them but it wasn’t an escape, it was an experience. I finished wanting to make positive change in my life.

These books rocked me to the core. The characters and their conflict was a word created mirror to reflect my heart and the issues I needed to take a look at and give to God. Where some might have found a book sounding too close to home distracting, I felt it was a little nudge from my Heavenly Father. I didn’t just read those two books; I devoured them.

What were they?

Kathryn Cushman’s Another Dawn

(From Bethany House Publishers/back cover)

What Would You Give for a Second Chance to Make Things Right?

When life gets complicated, Grace Graham runs. She’s left romantic relationships, friendships, and even her family after the death of her mother. But now her sister, Jana, is giving her once last chance: Come home and help care for their father–whom Grace still blames for her mother’s death–or never show her face in Shoal Creek, Tennessee, again.

With her son, Dylan, in tow, Grace returns home from California. But is she returning for the right reasons? And when costly decisions from the past suddenly put her son’s life and the lives of other children in town at risk, will she have the strength to stand strong and await Another Dawn?

The issue with the children at risk was a compelling one but that wasn’t what got to me. It was Grace’s recollection of her childhood and her adult choices because of them. Her walls are up and she’s made a vow never to return to her hometown. Although my circumstances weren’t that dramatic I remember making a vow when I moved 300 miles away from everything I knew and everyone I loved. My vow came from a potpourri of past experiences and current devastation.  When it came to relationships I was classic to walk away first to avoid what I thought was inevitable. Reading Another Dawn forced me to look at my vows and behaviors.

Christa Allan’s Walking on Broken Glass

(From Amazon.com)

Leah Thornton’s life, like her Southern Living home, has great curb appeal. But a paralyzing encounter with a can of frozen apple juice in the supermarket shatters the façade, forcing her to admit that all is not as it appears. When her best friend gets in Leah’s face about her refusal to deal with her life, Leah is forced to make an agonizing decision. Can she sacrifice what she wants to get what she needs? Joy, sadness, and pain converge, testing Leah’s commitment to her marriage, her motherhood, and her faith.

This book had funny dialogue but the reality that Leah has a problem and needs more help than her husband and friends can give hit so close to home I realized more than once I was holding my breath. I don’t want to give away spoilers but I know the environment she describes. I understand her roller coaster of emotions as she is forced to face her feelings. I’ve been the best friend and I’ve needed the best friend.

Did I finish those books thinking what a respite, I’m so relaxed now that I got to read? No, and that’s okay. Something even better took place in between those pages.

I received God’s love and  His direction.

How about you? Was there a book or two that you thought would be a fast read and in turn flipped your world upside down because it addressed the condition of your heart?

I never intended on becoming a book reviewer. However, since publishing my own book I have on occasion felt inspired to write a review of a story I enjoyed in hopes it might help readers find the book. This seems to be happening more frequently as there are a plethora of new good books being written, both traditionally and indie published. 

Recently I reviewed a book with an engaging story. The book was written by a UK author and made reference to many wild animals with which I am familiar. The problem was that the names of some of the animals are used differently in Europe from North America. I had not known this prior to reading the book but serendipitously learned of it when I was near the beginning. I felt it incumbent upon me to let readers know this to avoid any confusion. I posted a quick review but subsequently realized I could have written it better and revised it (a wonderful option in this digital age).

The whole thing got me thinking about reviewing. I don’t feel I am good at reviewing. I wondered if I should set up some kind of criteria for the ‘star’ rating Goodreads and Amazon, the two places to which I most often post reviews, insist upon.

In the end, I decided that might be prudent for professionals but it would not work for me. I read broadly, almost never buying for genre. Some books appeal for their characters, some for their captivating story, some for humor, others for their socially redeeming quality. For me to enjoy the book, one or two of those qualities need to be there but not necessarily all. I never begin a book with the intent to review anyway. So I will continue to just write from the heart and must-haves be damned.

 How about you? Do you have criteria you follow when reviewing books?

Another thing that I love about this commentary is that Sproul takes the time to explain the entire book. When opening the different chapters, the passage of scripture passage that will be covered is first. Then, Sproul works his way through the passage pointing out all of the details. It really helps that this book was a sermon series that he preached through at St. Andrews.

Overall, this is definitely a great resource for those studying through this book. I would highly recommend this to not only pastors, but also lay members.

Like Jeffrey Wasserstrom in the  Chronicle Review, I also love reading book reviews, and often spend vacation days not catching up on the latest novel or theoretical tome, but on all the book reviews I’ve seen and collected on Instapaper.  Wasserstrom’s piece goes against the grain of a lot of our thinking about book reviews, even mine, and it strikes me that he’s absolutely right about a lot of what he says.  First, I often tell students that one of the primary purposes of book reviewers is to help sift wheat from chafe and tell other readers what out there is worth the reading.  This is true, but only partially so.

Another way my thinking diverges from Lutz’s relates to his emphasis on positive reviews’ influencing sales. Of course they can, especially if someone as influential as, say, Michiko Kakutani (whose New York Times reviews I often enjoy) or Margaret Atwood (whose New York Review of Books essays I never skip) is the one singing a book’s praises. When I write reviews, though, I often assume that most people reading me will not even consider buying the book I’m discussing, even if I enthuse. And as a reader, I gravitate toward reviews of books I don’t expect to buy, no matter how warmly they are praised.

Consider the most recent batch of TLS issues. As usual, I skipped the reviews of mysteries, even though these are precisely the works of fiction I tend to buy. And I read reviews of nonfiction books that I wasn’t contemplating purchasing. For instance, I relished a long essay by Toby Lichtig (whose TLS contributions I’d enjoyed in the past) that dealt with new books on vampires. Some people might have read the essay to help them decide which Dracula-related book to buy. Not me. I read it because I was curious to know what’s been written lately about vampires—but not curious enough to tackle any book on the topic.

What’s true regarding vampires is—I should perhaps be ashamed to say—true of some big fields of inquiry. Ancient Greece and Rome, for example. I like to know what’s being written about them but rarely read books about them. Instead, I just read Mary Beard’s lively TLS reviews of publications in her field.

Reviews do influence my book buying—just in a roundabout way. I’m sometimes inspired to buy books by authors whose reviews impress me. I don’t think Lichtig has a book out yet, but when he does, I’ll buy it. The last book on ancient Greece I purchased wasn’t one Mary Beard reviewed but one she wrote.

I can only say yes to this.  It’s very clear that I don’t just read book reviews in order to make decisions as a consumer.  I read book reviews because I like them for themselves, if they are well-done, but also just to keep some kind of finger on the pulse of what’s going on.  In other words, there’s a way in which I depend on good reviewers not to read in order to tell me what to buy, but to read in my place since I can’t possibly read everything.  I can remain very glad, though, that some very good reader-reviewers out there are reading the many good things that there are out there to read.  I need them so I have a larger sense of the cultural landscape than I could possibly achieve by trying to read everything on my own.

Wasserstrom also champions the short review, and speculates on the tweeted review and its possibilities:

I’ve even been musing lately about the potential for tweet-length reviews. I don’t want those to displace other kinds, especially because they can too easily seem like glorified blurbs. But the best nuggets of some reviews could work pretty well within Twitter’s haiku-like constraints. Take my assessment of Kissinger’s On China. When I reviewed it for the June 13 edition of Time’s Asian edition, I was happy that the editors gave me a full-page spread. Still, a pretty nifty Twitter-friendly version could have been built around the best line from the Time piece: “Skip bloated sections on Chinese culture, focus on parts about author’s time in China—a fat book w/ a better skinnier one trying to get out.”

The basic insight here is critical.  Longer is not always better.  I’m even tempted to say not often better, the usual length of posts to this blog notwithstanding.  My experiences on facebook suggest to me that we may be in a new era of the aphorism, as well as one that may exalt the wit of the 18^th  century, in which the pithy riposte may be more telling than the blowsy dissertation.

A new challenge for my students in the next version of my book-reviewing class, write a review that is telling accurate and rhetorically effective in 160 characters or less.

The FIRST Wild Card Tours logo

I don’t know if it’s a ‘September’ thing, or what. But, once again I find myself dissatisfied with my reading.

[Edited to add: LOL... I just realized, by rolling over that link with my mouse, that I wrote last year's "dissatisfied" post on the exact same date! How hilarious is that?!]

Once again, I’ve overburdened myself with review books — I’ve gotten greedy, and asked for too many at once — and so I’ve burned myself out and feel like reading is a chore.

And yet, it’s still my passion. I won’t give up reading because, to me, that would be like deciding to quit breathing.

Lately, though, I’ve been considering giving up reviewing for a while. Not forever. I just miss the days when I could pick up a book at random, and read it just because it caught my eye while I was browsing the shelves (be those shelves in my own home, the library, or the bookstore).

It’s sad when you look at the books on your bookshelves and think, wistfully, “I wish I could read that.” But, you know you can’t, because you have obligations to fulfill… books you promised you’d read by certain dates.

Am I the only one who goes through this? Somebody tell me that I’m not alone in this craziness, please!

At first I thought I’d do what I did last year, and take a four-to-five month hiatus from reviewing. I usually take November-thru-January off because I can’t commit to anything in the months surrounding Christmas. Life is too crazy, then, and I know I’ll lack the focus to “read by a deadline”.

I’m really toying with the idea of taking a longer break, this time, though. Maybe even an entire year…

But –and don’t laugh– this scares me! It really does. All of these “what if’s” start running through my brain: “What if I miss out on reviewing something I really would’ve loved?” “What if I lose my place in the list of reviewers for the companies I review for — what if they stop offering me books?” “What if I like the break so much that I don’t want to go back to reviewing later?” (gasp!)

Ah…that last one is revealing. My identity is very much tied up in this. I see myself as a “book reviewer”… So much so, even, that the “FIRST Wild Card Tours” logo runs through my brain every time I say, “I’m a book reviewer” — my brain automatically tags onto that, “Read It. Review It. Blog It… It’s What I Do!” So, giving up reviewing is like losing –at least a part of– who I am.

Honestly, it’s not like I’d be giving up reviewing books, entirely. When I finish a book, it doesn’t matter where it has come from, I will review it. It’s a habit now… finish a book, write a review. So, my readers –here at SBR– would still get to read my thoughts on the books I’ve read. The decision is just whether or not to continue accepting books –for review, specifically– from blog-tour companies, etc. It’s whether or not I want the obligations deadlines any more.

The funny thing about all of this is that review books are still books that have caught my eye and pull me to want to read them. I am still reading these books because I want to. Obviously, no one is forcing me to choose them.

The only difference is that review books come with deadlines, and a sense of duty. I must put them before all of the other books I’d “like to read”. I can’t read anything else until I’ve finished my review books so that I won’t miss a deadline.

So many times, friends or family have offered to loan me books, and I’ve turned them down with, “Maybe later, but right now I’ve got to finish my review books.”

So many times, at my face-to-face book club meetings, the ladies will ask me how I liked the book choice of the month and I’ll have to say, “I didn’t get to read it, as I had review books that I needed to finish first.”

((I am sooooo tired of saying, “I have to finish my review books first“.))

It takes away from my sense of ‘community’, in a way. Eventually people are just going to stop talking to me about books they have read because they’ll think I won’t be interested; they’ll assume that I am “too busy with reviewing” to want to read something else. And that would be devastating.

Edited to Add: A lot of my frustration with reviewing (and more specifically, deadlines) comes from the fact that I work full-time now, and my reading time has greatly decreased. When I started reviewing several years ago, I had no job, and my kids were in school all day, so I had nothing better to do but sit around and read books. That’s all I did. Now, though, I work 9-5 (sometimes 9-7), plus have to take care of the house, plus take care of the kids — including chauffering them to their sports practices — and all the other normal “mom” things. I just don’t have the time, any more… nor the energy, really. Half the time, I just don’t want to read after work, ’cause I’ve been reading paperwork all day, already. That leaves me with some weeknights, but mostly just weekends. I’m grateful to have a job; don’t get me wrong. I’m just frustrated by my lack of time, that’s all.

I want my “freedom” back… freedom to read whatever sounds good at the moment, and to not put off my “in the mood for’s” until later (meaning: I’ll be wanting to read a romantic suspense novel, for example, but will put it off until my review books are finished, by which point my “romantic suspense” mood will have passed me by).

The decision has already been made, I guess. I will take an extended hiatus from “formal” reviewing (deadlines). It’s just a question of how long this break will last. I’m pretty sure I’ll still ask for a book to review, here and there, just to keep my place with the blog-tour/publicity companies, and because I know there will be books I can’t bear to pass up! LOL.

I have 5 books left to get to, and then I”ll start on this “vacation from reviewing”.

Stay tuned, as I will have LOTS of great “other” books to review for you — books I’ve bought that I’ve been anxiously wanting to get to!…”Vixen” by Jillian Larkin | “Small Town Sinners” by Melissa Walker | “Entwined” by Heather Dixon | “Between” by Jessica Warman | “Fallen” and “Torment” by Lauren Kate… and many more!

Maybe I’ll even be able to start reading some of my “Friday Finds” shortly after “finding” them, instead of just adding them to a “future TBRs” list!

Cathy Davidson, "Now You See It"

I wrote about Davidson a couple of days ago–she’s around a lot lately, as authors tend to be when a new book comes out that a publisher has decided to push—and I feel almost bad at taking up  only my crabbiest reactions to her recent work.  First, let me say that I briefly crossed paths with Davidson at Duke where she was hired the year I was finished my doctorate in English.  She seemed like a breath of fresh and genuine air in a department that could sometime choke on its collective self-importance, and the enthusiasm and generosity and love of teaching that Davidson evinces in this essay was evident then as well, though I never had her for class.  And, as this comment suggests, I think there’s a lot in this essay that’s really important to grapple with.  First, her suggestions of the ways that she and some of her colleagues at Duke trusted students with an experiment in iPod pedagogy paid off in so many unexpected ways, and we now know a good bit of that was far ahead of its time.  Moreover, she paints a wonderful picture of students as collaborative teachers in the learning process in her course on the way neuroscience is changing everything.  Still, as with a lot of these things that focus on student-centeredness, I find that promising insights are blinded by what amounts to a kind of ideology that may not be as deeply informed about human action as it really ought to be.  I felt this way in Davidson’s discussion of grading.

 There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don’t believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will “count on the test.” As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it’s a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test—as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over.

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone’s a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Davidson’s last minute veering into ad hominem covers over the fact that she doesn’t provide any actual evidence for the superiority of her method, offers a cultural fact for a substantive good—if this is how things are done in the age of digital thinking, it must be good, you old fogies—seems to crassly assume that any theory of judgment that does not rely on the intuitions of 20 year olds is necessarily anti-democratic and authoritarian, and glibly overlooks the social grounding within which her own experiment was even possible.  All of this does sound like a lot of stuff that comes out of graduate departments in English, Duke not least of all, but I wonder if the judgment is really warranted.

An alternate example would be a class I occasionally teach, when I have any time to teach at all any more, on book reviewing.  In the spirit of democratizing the classroom, I usually set this course up as a kind of book contest in which students choose books to review and on the basis of those reviews, books proceed through a process of winnowing, until at last, with two books left, we write reviews of the finalists and then vote for our book of the year.  The wisdom of the crowd does triumph in some sense because through a process of persuasion students have to convince their classmates what books are worth reading next.  The class is partly about the craft of book reviewing, partly about the business of book publishing, and partly about theories of value and evaluation.  We spend time not only thinking about how to write effective book reviews for different markets, we discuss how theorists from Kant to Pierre Bourdieu to Barbara Herrnstein Smith discuss the nature of value, all in an effort to think through what we are saying when we finally sit down and say one thing is better than another thing.

The first two times I taught this class, I gave the students different lists of books.  One list included books that were short listed for book awards, one list included first time authors, and one list included other books from notable publishers that I had collected during the previous year.  I told them that to begin the class they had to choose three books to read and review from the lists that I had provided, and that at least one book had to be from a writer of color (my field of expertise being Ethnic literature of the U.S., I reserved the right).  They could also choose one book simply through their own research to substitute for a book on one of my lists.  Debates are always spirited, and the reading is always interesting.  Students sometimes tell me that this was one of their favorite classes.

The most recent time I taught the class, I decided to take the steps in democratizing one step further by allowing the students to choose three books entirely on their own accord.  Before class began I told them how to go about finding books through the use of major industry organs like Publishers Weekly, as well as how to use search engines on Amazon and elsewhere—which, their digital knowledge notwithstanding, students are often surprised at what you can do on a search engine.  The only other guidance was students would ultimately have to justify their choices by defending in their reviews why they liked the books and thought they could be described as good works of literature, leaving open what we meant by terms like “good” and “literature” since that was part of the purpose of the course.

The results were probably predictable but left me disheartened nonetheless.  Only one book out of fifty some books in the first round was by a writer of color.  A predictable problem, but one I had kept my fingers crossed would not occur.  More than half the books chosen by my students were from romance, mystery, fantasy lit, and science fiction genres.  Strictly speaking I didn’t have a problem with that since I think great works of fiction can be written in all kinds of genres, and most works of what we call literary fiction bear the fingerprints of their less reputable cousins (especially mystery writing, in my view, but that’s another post).  I thought there might be a chance that there would be some undiscovered gem in the midst.  I do not have the time to read all fifty books, of course, but rely on students to winnow for me and then try to read every book that gets to the round of eight.  It’s fair to say that in my personal authoritarian aesthetic, none of the books that fell in to that generic category could have been called a great work of fiction, though several of them were decent enough reads.  Still, I was happy to go with this and see where things would take us, relatively sure that as things went on and we had to grapple with what it meant to evaluate prose, we would probably still come out with some pretty good choices.

Most of the works that I would have considered literary were knocked out by the second round, though it is the case that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom made it all the way to the finals, paired against Lisa Unger’s entry from 2010, whose title I can’t even remember now.  In the end the class split almost down the middle, but chose Unger’s book as the best book they had read during the course of the semester.  Not that I thought it was a terrible book. It was a nice enough read and Unger is a decent enough mystery writer.  But being asked to remember the book is a little like being asked to remember my last trip to MacDonalds.  One doesn’t go there for memorable dining experience, and one doesn’t read Lisa Unger in order come up with books that we will care to remember several weeks after having set them down.  But what was perhaps most intriguing to me was that after an hour long discussion of the two books in which students offered spirited defenses of each writer, I asked them that if they could project themselves in to the year 2020 and had to choose only one book to include on a syllabus in a course on the best books of 2010, which book would it be.  Without exception the students voted for Franzen’s book.  When I asked the students who changed their votes why this would be, they said “We think that Franzen is more important, we just liked reading Unger more.”

This is the nub.  Can the wisdom of crowds decide what is most important?  To that, the answer can only be “sometimes”.  As often crowds choose what is conveniently at hand, satisfies a sweet tooth, or even the desire for revenge. Is there a distinction between what is important or what is true and what is merely popular?  Collaboration can lead us past blindnesses, but it is not clear that the subjectivity of a crowd is anything but blind (in my original draft I typed “bling”, a telling typographical slip and one that may be truer and more interesting than “blind.”  It is not clear that they can consistently be relied upon by their intuition to decide what ought to last. This may not be digital thinking, but at least it is thinking, something crowds cannot be always relied upon to do.

If we could really rely on crowds to make our choices, we would discover that there is really very little to choose between almost anything.  Going on Amazon, what is amazing is that four stars is the average score for all of the 100,000s of thousands of books that are catalogued.  And popularity trumps everything:  Lisa Scottoline scores higher in a lot of cases than Jane Austen.  Literally everything is above average and worth my time.  This is because in the world of the crowd, people mostly choose to be with those crowds that are most like themselves and read those things that are most likely to reinforce the sense they have that they are in the right crowd to begin with.  This is true as even elementary studies of internet usage have pointed out.  Liberals read other liberals, and delight in their wisdom and the folly of conservatives.  Conservatives read other conservatives and do likewise.  This too is digital thinking, and in this case it is quite easily seen that crowds can become authoritarian over and against the voice of the marginalized.  My students choices to not read students of color unless I tell them to is only one small reminder of that.

Which leads to one last observation.  I wonder, indeed, whether it is not the case that this experiment worked so well at Duke because students at Duke already know what it takes to get an A.  That is, in some sense Davidson is not really crowdsourcing at all but is relying on the certain educational processes that will deliver students well-attuned to certain forms of cultural excellence,  able to create effectively and “challenge” the status quot because they are already deeply embedded within those forms of culture excellence and all the assumptions they entail.  That is, as with many pedagogical theories offered by folks at research institutions, Davidson isn’t theorizing from the crowd but from a tiny elite and extremely accomplished sample.  As Gerald Graff points out, most of us most want to teach the students that don’t need us, that means most of us want to teach at places where none of the students actually need us.  Davidson’s lauding of her students in the fact that they don’t’ really need her to learn may merely be an index of their privilege, not the inherent wisdom of crowds or the superiority of her pedagogical method.   Her students have already demonstrated that they know what it takes to get A’s in almost everything because they have them—and massively high test scores besides—or they are unusually gifted in other ways or they wouldn’t be at Duke.  These are the students who not only read all their AP reading list the summer before class started, they also read all the books related to the AP reading list and  have attended tutoring sessions to learn to write about them besides.

Let me hasten to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with their being accomplished.  On some level, I was one of them in having gone to good private colleges and elite graduate programs.  But it is a mistake to assume that the well-learned practices of the elite, the cultural context that reinforces those practices, and the habits of mind that enable the kinds of things that Davidson accomplished actual form the basis for a democratizing pedagogy for everyone.  Pierre Bourdieu 101.

Jane Ciabattari, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, provides “a snapshot of the state of book reviewing today.”

Wednesday link kangaroo

A kangaroo walks into a bar.

“Wow!” the bartender says; “We don’t get many kangaroos in here.”

“Yeah,” says the Kangaroo, “And at these prices, you’re not going to get many more.”

…I know it’s pathetic, but that’s always been one of my favorite jokes, and the link list seemed the best place for it.

• Our lead link this week: David Santisteven on How To Fail as a Worship Leader In Ten Easy Steps. (Step 5: Leave theology to the preachers.)
  
• And here’s a bonus ten for people interested in worship: Ten Ideas to Incorporate the Scriptures into a Worship Service.
  
• They won’t respond to communication from outsiders, but a surprising number of Amish Teens are now on Facebook, getting online through their cellphones.
• Sarah Pulliam Bailey brings an 7-page look at the reshaping of Focus on the Family; and a 2-page sidebar as to what James Dobson is up to.
  
• Dana at Upwrite asks all the hard questions about the TOMS shoes fad.  (If I’d known you could get that word length writing about shoes, I would have done it long ago!)
  
• Let’s go two in a row from Upwrite: Can you be a hybrid Christian? Can you combine ideas from other faiths with Christian belief?
  

Click the image above to see 226 more pictures from North Carolina's Wild Goose Festival in June by photographer Courtney Perry

• If you missed the Wild Goose Festival, photographer Courtney Perry has 227 pictures; you can even purchase copies.
  
• John Starke nails it on How to Write a Great Book Review (Or How Not to Write a Bad One).
  
• Speaking of which, Benji Zimmerman does a great review of Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle’s Erasing Hell the response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins. (Easier to read with a Javascript Black/White swap app.)
  
• And Chan himself sits down with Mark Galli at CT for what appears to be an interview but is really more of a dialog.
  
• Stephen Brewster was one of many syncrobloggers who joined together in June to talk about blocks to creativity.  He links to some of the other writers, too.
  
• Frank Turk digs into the can of worms being opened by New York’s new marriage law.
  
• Craig Groeshel, the guy with the .tv web domains, is now suggesting individuals and families take a few nights off each week to unplug.
  
• A few days late for the 4th, but for our American friends, Louis Giglio reflects on the Declaration of Independence with Chris Tomlin on camera and some cheap shots at England’s Matt Redman.  (HT: Worship Blog)
  
• Matt Rawlings brings his twice yearly top five books list, and his top 62 “geek” books list.
  
• Also on books, Jon, our academic book-watcher on the left coast wants you to know about Christians at the Border: Immigration, The Church and the Bible.  Basically this is a Guatemalan professor of Old Testament studies discussing social policy.  Here’s the publisher’s 411, and a 9-pg .pdf preview.
  
• Adam Young, aka Owl City, has a new video, packed with footage from the Back to the Future movies.  Check out Deer in the Headlights.
  
• But we can take the animal video linking thing further with this Charlie the Hamster audio file. (HT: Stuff Fundies Like.)
  
• Anne Jackson, transparent as ever, has reactivated her blog which has been dormant since March.  You can read her posts from June 17th and June 24th.
• No link here, but my son Chris put this on his Facebook page:
  .
  The Parable of the Dry Stick
  .
  I was out for a hike a while ago and there was a stick on the path.  I gave it a kick, and all the bark broke off and scattered, leaving only the bare, white wood.
  .
  God then said:  “The world is full of people who will completely change, who are just waiting to be prompted, quietly hoping someone will disrupt their daily ennui.”
  .
   If you know one of those people, give them a proverbial kick.  Tell them their life can amount to something.  Invite them to join the adventure of discovering God.

Separated at Birth (and by a few generations) — Lyn Cryderman, author of Glory Land, republished as No Swimming on Sunday and Colton Burpo of Heaven is for Real fame.  The Cryderman book is a bit of a hard-to-find collector’s item but an excellent document capturing growing up in America in the Free Methodist denomination.  “I gotta home in Glory land that outshines the sun…Way beyond the blue”

By Janice Harayda

For years Meghan Cox Gurdon has been reviewing books for children and teenagers for the Wall Street Journal – at first biweekly and, since the launch of the paper’s book review section in late 2010, weekly. Her reviews are consistently intelligent and well-written and almost always favorable.

Cox Gurdon clearly has made it her mission to look for and call attention to high-quality books for children and teenagers on many topics and in a variety of genres. She has praised books as different as Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which won the 2008 Caldecott Medal from the American Library Association, and Ruth Krauss’s reissued classic The Backward Day.

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published “Darkness Too Visible,” one of the rare articles by Cox Gurdon that faulted a major trend — the burgeoning array of novels for adolescents that involve violence, abuse or other bleak topics. For this she has been pilloried in blogs and on Twitter at the hashtag #YASaves, which was created  in response her story and has generated more than 15,000 responses, according to the trade newsletter ShelfAwareness. Cox Gurdon has been called “biased” (@KelliTrapnell), “idiotic” (@fvanhorne), “a right-wing nut” (@annejumps), full of “ugliness” (@AprilHenryBooks), and “brittle, ignorant, shrewish” (@Breznian).

What did Cox Gurdon do to earn this torrent of vitriol? She did what critics are supposed to do – to look beyond plot and characterization and consider the deeper themes and issues raised by novels. In “Darkness Too Visible,” she questioned the effects of books like Jackie Morse Kessler’s Rage, a “gruesome but inventive” 2011 book about a girl whose secret practice of cutting herself “turns nightmarish after a sadistic sexual prank.” Cox Gurdon quotes a passage from the novel that says: ”She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t breathe.”

It is entirely legitimate for a reviewer to ask, as Cox Gurdon does, how this might affect a vulnerable child or teenager:

“The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional turbulence without a knife.

“Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.”

Anyone who writes about children’s books regularly knows that Cox Gurdon hasn’t made up this trend: Books, like movies, keep getting more lurid. Or, as she puts it, the publishing industry is serving up “ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers.” If this issue might not concern all adults, it would surely concern some, given how many buy books as gifts for children without having time to look at much more than the cover and flap copy. And Cox Gurdon isn’t saying: Never read young-adult books. She’s saying: Know what’s in those books, and use judgment, as you would with movies.

Contemporary child-rearing experts urge parents to protect their children in ways that would have been unthinkable a couple of generations ago, when psychologists warned of about the dangers of “overprotectiveness.” This shift has resulted from social changes that require more caution, and Cox Gurdon has encouraged adults to apply to their children’s reading the level of care that they bring to all other areas of their lives. Is this so terrible? Thousands of people on Twitter have said, “Yes.” Anyone who believes that adolescents’ reading habits matter as much as their viewing habits may disagree. In her latest article and others, Cox Gurdon has paid young people’s literature the highest compliment:  She has given children’s books the close scrutiny that, in an age of shrinking book-review sections, typically goes only to those for adults. For that, she deserves gratitude.

Janice Harayda is a novelist and award-winning journalist who has been the book editor of the Plain Dealer, the book columnist for Glamour, and vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications.  Since 2006 she has edited One-Minute Book Reviews, named one of New Jersey’s best blogs in the April 2011 issue of New Jersey Monthly. You can follow Jan (@janiceharayda) on Twitter at www.twitter.com/janiceharayda.

(c) 2011 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.