LH: What do you think the purpose of a review is? If you also write about books on a blog, why? What does blogging let you do differently?

SB: There are those who believe that book reviews should confine themselves to a description of what a book is and avoid any attempt at evaluation. This is perhaps an offshoot of the marketing impulse to use reviews as a mechanism to help sell the book. My own feeling is that, although book reviews can have an effect on sales, they are not marketing tools. Rather, they represent an evaluative assessment of a particular work. Such an assessment should be based on evidence from the book under consideration and should rely on certain literary standards. (A reviewer who cannot see the literary merit in, for example, Moby-Dick or Madame Bovary – whether or not that person actually likes the books – will probably not do well in the business.)

But a good review should give more than a cursory “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to a particular work. It should engage actively with the text and should be cognizant of where the text fits in a literary tradition (or how it breaks from that tradition). It should be honest and discriminating, though not petty or vituperative. And it should be aware of any text on two simultaneous levels: the level of form and the level of content.

Clearly, this requires much of a reviewer: she must be, in Philip Marchand’s words, “very intelligent”; she must be knowledgeable about literary history; she must be courageous enough to offer clear opinions about matters of literary merit, as well as flexible enough to recognize merit in writing that might not be specific to the reviewer’s own taste or approach, if the reviewer is also an author. (Book reviewers, of course, are unique among critics in that they work in the same medium as the artists under review, and therefore have the potential to outperform their subjects.)

Although I regularly write print reviews (for Quill & Quire, where I am review editor, and for Canadian Notes and Queries, among other places), I continue to maintain a literary website, That Shakespearean Rag. The blog allows me certain freedoms that I don’t otherwise enjoy: I’m allowed to set my own agenda and to choose the books I want to cover, and I’m not restricted to a specific word count or a limited spectrum of books available for review. For instance, I can review international books, which I can’t do at Quill, and I can write about books that are not current releases. On the blog I am free to indulge my enthusiasms, rather than being beholden to any particular editorial mandate.

For the rest of the interview, please go here.