Q&A …

… The Freedom of the Book Review: John Wilson on the job of the book critic and the importance of miscellany in the good reading life. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Many people, I've discovered over the years, have a narrow conception of what a book review can do or should do. This reaches its nadir in the perception of a review as essentially a “book report,” hence (supposedly) boring. But what attracted me from the beginning (though, again, I couldn't have said so at the time) was the enormous freedom the form allows! A good review can be “impersonal” or “personal.” It can be focused almost entirely on the book (or books) at hand or use the book under review primarily as a point of departure. There are very few “rules,” in fact, though this or that editor, this or that publication, may impose all sorts of constraints. That freedom appealed to me enormously (it still does), and I enjoyed seeing how many different ways a review could be done, and done well.