I was going to write about my increasingly worrying addiction to GoodReads. In the end, though, this has become a post about the deprofessionalization of book reviewing, based on a consideration of the very diverse influence of reviewers Michiko Kakutani and Emily May, the former a stalwart of The New York Times and the latter of GoodReads. I have not found any piece connecting or comparing them, but I would certainly encourage other bloggers to further the comparison for what it reveals about the end of an era in literary appreciation which should concern all of us, book lovers.
Michiko Kakutani (b. 1955), was The New York Times’ book critic from 1983 to 2017, a task for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998, “For her passionate, intelligent writing on books and contemporary literature.” Kakutani, who has a degree in English from Yale University, where John Hersey was her mentor, was initially a reporter for The Washington Post and Time magazine, before being hired in 1979 by the NYT. During her four-decade tenure there, she became known for her biting reviews but also for her support of writers whose careers she helped to launch (though she could be nonchalantly vicious in reviews of their later work, as Zadie Smith knows first-hand). Writers feared Kakutani so much that, as a Slate article notes, “her name became a verb, and publishers have referred to her negative reviews as ‘getting Kakutani’ed’.”
In the same article, published on occasion of her retirement as a critic, Marissa Martinelli wrote that “her only voice was authority, the Timesian declaration of critical judgment. (…) She delivered her reviews with the serene assurance of the always-right, secure in her belief that she could even see into writers’ hearts to see just how deeply they were feeling” (original emphasis). When The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke asked Kakutani in a 2020 interview about being feared and her sense of responsibility, she replied: “I just tried to review each book that came along on its merits. I’d started out at the Times as a reporter, and when I first turned to reviewing, an editor gave me this advice: think about it as a form of reporting but with the addition of your own carefully considered opinion.” She was then only 28, and my guess is that she carried the smugness of the young reader into the persona she created for herself as what we would call today an influencer and, seeing that it worked, kept it on. The real Michiko kept herself so private that someone at the NYT quipped they knew more about J.D. Salinger.
Kakutani quit the NYT to become, of all things, a published author of a couple of books against Trump, the bestsellers The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (2018) and The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider (2024). She also published in 2020 Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, which might seem to be her personal response to the likes of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). I leave for another post whether Kakutani became Bloom’s replacement when learned college professors ceased being influential among readers. Seemingly, Kakutani was happy enough to retire from criticism to write books, but, as Vanity Fair explained, her voluntary buyout was part of the NYT’s plan to “budget for some 100 additional reporters;” these buyouts also included “other notable Times figures” such as Charles Duhigg, Ian Fisher, LaSharah Bunting, Bruce Headlam, and Fernanda Santos. End of an era.
In the new era, Kakutani has become the object of scathing reviews both in the media and the social media. Dan Kois called her “bland” and panned with glee her 2024 book: “Michiko Kakutani, expert reviewer, has reviewed the past 10 years. She’s read everything there is to read on the internet, and taken extensive notes, and now she’s delivering her take. Well, was it good? No—it was bad” (original emphasis). Kakutani’s GoodReads reviews place all her books below the critical four-star rating; The Great Wave, published in February this year, only gets a paltry 3.20 rating, with just 133 ratings and 27 reviews, which means nobody cares for it. First lesson, then: a book critic should never become a published author (except for selections of their reviews). Second lesson: the power of the professional reviewer is gone.
Now, let me explain a few more things before I get to Emily May. In 1995, Amazon first introduced its customers’ review features, an idea that seemed at the time extreme. In a note published in August 2023 by Vaughn Schermerhorn, Director of Community Shopping at Amazon, which enthuses about the scary “new AI-generated customer review highlights,” Amazon boasts that “While the idea wasn’t universally embraced, it was embraced by our customers.” Indeed it was. The problem was that, when it came to books, other sites were gaining traction, and the rising star was GoodReads.
GoodReads, Wikipedia reports, was launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler. Attracted by its 20 million monthly visits (by July 2012), Amazon purchased GoodReads on 28 March 2013, which unleashed a flood of negative comments about how this would increase Jeff Bezos’s power over the publishing industry, as it has done. You may read the Wikipedia article and other sources for details of the programming interface, the Discovereads book recommendation engine, and the algorithm used to recommend books. For me, the main issue is how GoodReads has radically changed the way book reviewing works, not only because of phenomena such as review bombing and others, but because it does not use professional reviewing.
Unlike booktubers or booktokers, who can monetize their videos (see for instance NerdWallet’s article on TikTok), GoodReads reviewers may get free books to review but no other compensation; they may, of course, link their reviews to their own YouTube channels or book blogs. In principle this seems fine. However, the problem is that by giving away their reviews, GoodReads contributors are helping Amazon mine data for free and destroying in the process the professional market for book reviewing. As Arvyn Cerézo explained in Book Riot, GoodReads is hard to monetize, but “it remains a data gold mine for the corporate giant as it retains its hold over the publishing industry. GoodReads and/or Amazon is probably getting more mileage with tons of user data they collected throughout the years, and that’s all that matters in the digital age. Just ask Meta.” This is why although I opened an account back in 2013, I have never posted any reviews. If I must work for free, then I’d rather do it here in this blog.
This is where Emily May comes in. This English woman is the most popular reviewer of all time on GoodReads, with currently 6079 books rated, 2074 reviewed (her reviews average 300 words), 150000 followers and 648044 votes. In her inactive YouTube account, she presents herself as the founder of book review blog The Book Geek, though this is no longer available (or I can’t find it). According to her LinkedIn profile, May joined GoodReads in 2013, the same year she opened her blog, though her stats page indicates was already a user years earlier. In a GoodReads interview posted in 2017, May is introduced as a Yorkshire native living in Los Angeles, where she works “as a freelance editor and beta-reader, giving publishers feedback on soon-to-be-released novels.” A reader of about 200 books a year, May hopes that her followers find thanks to her recommendations “books they love. I don’t care if that’s because they read a book I reviewed positively or if they saw something they personally enjoy in a negative review I wrote.” She claims to be “pretty good at recommending books specific to the individual asking” and takes “great pleasure in recommending authors I perceive to be underappreciated” in all genres. Although she also has a bookstagram account this is private.
I have not come across any interview in which Michiko Kakutani discusses GoodReads reviewing, booktubers or booktokers, or mentions Emily May. Their names never overlap, though it seems to me that they should. Both women occupy similar positions as top reviewers whose judgement many other readers heed, but belong to extremely different worlds. Their influence (for both are influencers) stretches in different directions: Kakutani defended a high literary standard in tune with her NYT readers; May is guiding omnivorous readers like herself, who just want the next good read. Her advantage, and that of GoodReads, is that she reviews all kinds of books, not just novelties but also books from the past (I hesitate to use the word ‘classics’).
Kakutani appropriated for herself the power to make or break literary careers, while for May that is not an issue; she is in fact far less prejudiced and, as such, indirectly puts Kakutani to shame for her often prejudiced reviews. This does not mean that GoodReads contributors have no standards; they do, but they connect mostly with their own pleasure in reading, not some external ‘History of (Anglophone) Literature’. Besides, authors generally fear the power of GoodReads, as they should, but at least the platform prohibits the attacks ad homine, which is not the case in the press. Or the other way round. Irked by her reviews, Jonathan Franzen once called Kakutani “the stupidest person in New York” and Norman Mailer suggested she was just the token Asian presence in the NYT, insults that GoodReads simply does not tolerate. There, Emily May’s voice, no matter how powerful, is not the voice of authority, but just once among a chorus that, yes, often sounds cacophonic. So why should she be berated as Kakutani has been?
I’m just warning future historians of Literature that this major turning point, the passing of the critical relay baton from Michiko Kakutani to Emily May needs to be studied in depth, for the present and for posterity. May has not reviewed (yet) any books by Kakutani, but it would be interesting to see what she has to say about the dethroned queen. On the other hand, it would be equally interesting to see how Kakutani would rate May’s reviews, for here’s the other main novelty: before GoodReads, nobody rated reviews. Emily May has not actively dethroned Kakutani, and the latter appears to have abdicated of her own accord, but there has been a transition, perhaps from a monarchy to a republic of the letters, which May presides at no cost to Amazon, the tyrant threatening to drown all other voices in publishing. Ultimately, Jeff Bezos is running the show, and let’s please recall that while he does not own the NYT, still a major player with its lists of bestselling books, he does own The Washington Post.
What about my own use of guidance by Kakutani or May? Well, I’ve never used it. I’ve never been a NYT’s subscriber, and I disliked the few reviews I read by Kakutani for her smugness, the worst sin of unkind reviewers. I don’t follow May either, for the simple reason that I don’t follow anyone on GoodReads. I think the point of this platform is its ability to merge many voices in a very noisy hubbub, usually very rich, and I don’t really care whether a person whose opinion I read has many followers or highly-rated reviews. I am possibly using the platform in many wrong ways, but, then, I am a pre-social media relic trying to cope with this mad brave world of contemporary literature as well as I can.
More next week…