I have finally started teaching my new subject Contemporary Literature in English after months of preparation and this is my first post directly connected to the issues raised in class. The subject, as I explained to the students, has two main purposes: familiarizing them with the most relevant fiction and non-fiction published between 1990 and 2023, and teaching them to write 800-word formal reviews (which I intend to publish in a book reviewing blog that will remain open for as long as the subject, a core fourth-year one, lasts).
I don’t know what is the first important lesson they have learned—possibly, that there is a significant difference between living memory and history based on each person’s age, which conditions how we understand the contemporary. Only I and a student who was then seven saw live on TV the 9/11 attacks of 2001; most students were not even born then, so that world-altering event is for them history and for us two living memory.
The main lesson I have learned is that I might be teaching the students an obsolete skill by training them as reviewers. I realized this when I asked them how they choose their next book. The replies I got were: recommendations from friends, getting interested in the source of a film adaptation, following an author they already liked, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Instagram, YouTube and, yes, GoodReads, though this social network is only used by about 25% of the class. What is missing from this list? The elephant in the room: professional reviews published in traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and academic journals. In contrast, when I later met a colleague, who is from Argentina, and I told her how much I had enjoyed the non-fiction volume La llamada by Argentinian journalist Leila Guerrero, she told me that she had just bought the book because of the excellent reviews she had read. I myself got to know about this book also through the reviews (El País) and through the weekly newsletter of its publisher, Anagrama.
As I explained, perhaps too briefly, one thing is a recommendation and another a review. The comments that friends and book influencers offer tend to be brief and laudatory, and not really analytical. Their intention is that you read the book they recommend because they believe it will give you pleasure, though book influencers often benefit in more direct ways by getting other books to recommend for free or even a fee. Friends and social network commentary is usually brief, and in the case of friends it is usually followed by an offer of conversation (“read it, and then we can talk about it”). It would be quite surprising if a friend, or a social network user, offered a lengthy dissection of a book, though of course that might happen. The review, and not the mere recommendation offers the dissection.
The book review is a central staple of the literary magazine, which has the aim of presenting novelties to the reading public and guiding it. Wikipedia informs that the first literary magazine was Nouvelles de la république des lettres (1684). In Britain, the newspapers came first, with The Oxford Gazette started in 1665 and The Times in 1785 (I mention the newspapers because most carry book reviews in their culture section, I don’t know if they did that originally). The first great British literary magazine was Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith’s The Edinburgh Review (1802). The North American Review (1815), is, Wikipedia informs “the oldest American literary magazine. However, it had its publication suspended during World War II, and the Yale Review (founded in 1819) did not; thus the Yale journal is the oldest literary magazine in continuous publication.” I am not going to summarize here the long history of the literary magazine but merely to observe that until the advent of social media 20 years ago (Facebook was launched in 2004), most readers got their recommendations from reviews in print media (apart from friends and family, and let’s not forget librarians) until recommendations and reviews became separate types of text.
When I was an undergraduate, in the 1980s, I would read religiously the reviews in the newspaper El País, and follow the literary magazine Quimera (founded in 1980). Of course, I also asked my teachers for guidance and read academic publications (mainly books) to navigate my way into the classics and books from the recent past which were already literary history. For popular fiction, I followed mostly friends’ recommendations until the first websites started appearing (mid to late 1990s) and other sources of information came up (also lighter literary magazines such as Qué Leer). The main point I’m raising is that before social media, recommendations and reviews were offered with no expectation of any reply from the persons receiving them. Print media offer unilateral communication and if you didn’t like a review, there was no way you could make that public.
Then the like button was invented for the new social networks (in 2005) and most print publications went online, allowing a space for readers’ comments. Please, note that Amazon had already offered customers’ reviews in 1995, a year before the internet was first commercialized in Spain. Since books are one of the main products Amazon originally offered (now you can buy anything), it can be said that their portal is the first unofficial social network in which readers interacted offering book ratings and book recommendations, sometimes extended enough to qualify as book reviews. GoodReads, launched in 2007, presented itself as a social network focused on offering opinions on books, an idea shared by other networks but that worked particularly well for this one. In 2013 Amazon purchased GoodReads, seeing that its own network (Shelfari) could not compete with it. Many protested then that GoodReads would be dominated by Amazon’s commercial interests and in many ways this is what has happened.
I took to class a review of the last book I have read, Olivia Laing’s The Garden against Time, published in The Observer. At 880 words, this is similar in extension to what students need to write but, of course, as I read it aloud to them we all saw how far this exquisite, literary review by Rachel Cooke is from what a beginner can manage. A student commented that it seemed to have been written for academics, but I think she meant for highly educated people. And this is main question with reviews: whether they deal with fine literature like Laing’s book or with Amazon’s new series The Rings of Power they do aim at readers who are if not highly educated at least highly knowledgeable. The reviewers themselves need to be knowledgeable. Imagine writing a review of The Rings of Power with no idea about who Tolkien is and no familiarity with his work.
The problem with recommendations is that you don’t have to be highly knowledgeable to make them: you just offer them. Nobody would hire a poorly trained person to write professional reviews for a newspaper or magazine, for it would be quickly obvious that this person lacks the knowledge of the field that reviewing requires (this applies to book reviewing but also to any other type of review, including music or videogames). Yet, social media have no filters and anyone can post their opinions. In social media like GoodReads the border between recommendation and review is blurred, as many users offer very lengthy texts, often reproduced from their blogs. No serious publication, however, would hire any top GoodReads reviewer, for they are good at recommending but not so much at reviewing. What GoodReads does very well is to offer an overview of how readers (or at least the readers who use GoodReads) like a book. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us has a staggering 4.15 rating, with 3.8 million votes and 278.000 ‘reviews’ (that is, readers’ opinions), but it is not the object of serious reviewing in The Guardian or The New York Times (curiously, both review the film adaptation). Why not? Because it cannot pass any minimally serious critical filter (this has nothing to do with its genre but with its confection and content).
So, although originally I considered asking students to post their reviews to GoodReads (UAB told me I could not do that because this is an external platform), I see now that their training in writing reviews needs to aim higher, not with recommendation in view (or a star rating) but with opinion and analysis. Of course, posting an opinion online in any social media is easy, even if that opinion is abusive and written in colourful language. What is far more difficult is aiming at publications controlled by a demanding editor, for which you need quite specific skills. And possibly contacts. I have myself published quite a few academic book reviews, but I have no idea how one manages to publish a review in prestige newspapers or literary magazines. I’ll have to ask!