Once upon a time, the life of a freelance book critic could be an eerily quiet affair. In 1995, a couple of years after Simon & Schuster axed the imprint where I’d labored for three years on the bottom rungs of the editorial ladder, I worked some old publishing contacts and snagged a book review assignment for the Baltimore Sun. I had never written for an audience any bigger or more exacting than the desultory skimmers of my college newspaper. More to the point, I had never written anything for money. Failure seemed more of a probability than a possibility, and I proceeded with a caution approaching cold fear.
Ten years later this predicament has become so obsolete it’s hard to even remember clearly. The sense of resigned irrelevance with which I used to dispatch my work into the black hole has been inverted. I now submit copy with something closer to thrilling apprehension. For a few years now, most critics have been able to count on national exposure via the online editions of the papers they write for. They enjoy a vastly expanded audience, readers have access to all they can eat in book criticism, and it’s hard to see how this is anything less than a windfall of cosmic proportions for all. But it’s only very recently that online exposure has developed a new wrinkle–the lit bloggers’ revenge.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This new wave of book blogs attracted a lot of traffic (About Last Night will soon pass one million hits) and, eventually, mainstream media attention, some of it less than flattering. “The gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other–and say so every chance they get,” snarked Washington Post writer Jennifer Howard in December 2003. One big, giddy circle jerk was how she described us–“in love with themselves, each other, and the beauty of what they’re creating,” linking to each other liberally and uncritically, with actual book coverage taking a backseat to schmoozing.
I came out as Laura on About Last Night in February. Around the same time, The Elegant Variation kicked off a new weekly feature digesting, critiquing, and grading the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Times, the sole major U.S. Sunday books supplement to lock all of its online content away from nonsubscribers, was asking for it, having removed itself from the big, chaotic, inclusive conversation that goes on 24/7 on the Internet. Soon enough, though, Mark started slapping letter grades not only on the section as a whole, but on each individual review–a practice sure to strike fear in the heart of even the most practiced, poised, and professional critic. The scrutiny is hardly unfair, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t scary (and a tad condescending). Gee, I thought when the grades started coming down–thank goodness I don’t write for the Times.
