The trouble with the review form..

is that it turns the (book, movie, recording) into a commodity and the experience of (reading, watching, listening) into social conformity. The punchline is a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating. The book is good/bad, and you’d like/hate it too.

This leaves out the subjectivity of the observer. My experience of a work of culture is partly evaluation against definable criteria (the book’s plot is predictable), and partly the interaction between the book’s content and my emotional and intellectual experience. When I read a book, I evaluate these things somewhat separately. Is it a “good book” — well-researched, well-plotted, etc. And did I learn something new, did I have an emotional and esthetic experience.

Because the experience is subjective, a recommendation can’t be general-purpose. There’s a genre of folk ballad that can usually make me cry. Not sure whether it’s “good music” or “bad music” — just that it flips some switches and buttons to trigger a strong emotional experience.

Also, the “book review” format emphasizes the dialog between reviewer and reader, rather than the dialog between writer and reader (this point makes more sense for books than other forms). I experience reading not as an act of consumption but as a conversation, separated in time and space from the writing. (That’s why it’s so darn cool when weblog trackbacks invoke comments from authors; it becomes a live conversation).

So, the essays about books here aren’t really book reviews — they’re essays with esthetic evaluation, and personal emotional/intellectual reaction, and response to the author’s ideas.

p.s. This isn’t as solipsistic as it sounds. The act of recommendation is an intimate act, not a public one. A recommendation is based on empathy; experiencing a work of culture through the filter of another’s intellectual and emotional preferences, and assessing whether the other person might enjoy the work. A generic thumbs-up/thumbs-down public recommendation is a much more pallid thing.