Eating Disorders: Book Reviews Fiction

Saturday 10 November 2012

Book Reviews Fiction

Guardian first book award: From the slums of Mumbai to the sink estates of Aberdeen, the frontline in Iraq to the revolution in Libya – plus a hit novel about US college baseball – the titles on this year's shortlist confront some of the most urgent issues of recent years. One popular complaint is that book reviews are merely a byproduct of the publishing industry and therefore stink of mediocrity, elitism, nepotism, or all three. In 1846, Poe wrote that book reviews (and the publishing industry) were a sham and riddled with nepotism: "We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright." In 1917, H.L. Mencken bemoaned the "inconceivable complacency and conformity" of journalistic criticism. Forty years later, Elizabeth Hardwick echoed these sentiments when she said of reviewing, "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns."