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| Hearsay: |
I’ve noted here a few times how the books coverage at the CBC online has drifted away, which is sad. It’s mostly CP and AP wire stories now, with very little original coverage of literature. There was a time I though CBC online was the best Canadian arts coverage around. Now I remember to go there in the morning only as an afterthought. Looks like I’m not alone: THIS! magazine puts the boots to the Ceeb and makes the case for a full time literary czar who’s paid by the public coffer to think books.
Book reviewing in Canada has never been strong and recently got worse. Last year, several papers, including the Toronto Star, reduced their book coverage by as much as 50 percent. The Globe and Mail’s stand-alone books section ceased to stand alone and was folded into another section of that paper. Last spring, CBC Radio cut the literary debate show Talking Books so Shelagh Rogers could tug her aural smile through some author interviews. Interviews do a good job of showing us which authors interview well. But they don’t tell us what makes novel X better than novel Y. Noah Richler’s book about CanLit, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?, repeatedly mentions that the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist was half-full of Canadians but never once concedes that only two people in Canada—the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere and the National Post’s Philip Marchand—make a living reviewing books.
As a nation, as a culture, we have only two salaries devoted to helping us choose where to invest our reading time and money. Two! (Note to bloggers: I said “make a living reviewing books” and “salaries.”)
…
Oh, wait, right, we’re supposed to think that the annual CBC Radio shouting match Canada Reads counts for book reviewing. After all, it allows Olympic fencers to give sound bites of literary analysis. Each year, a different aging Canadian musician gets a few minutes to champion one book and pooh-pooh four others. Not enough.
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June 24th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Agreed!
Current book reviews are kind of smoke and mirrors anyways. Since most of the reviews we read are done by other authors (as noted by the small, italicized print at the bottom of the review which says “Tony James is the author of Where to Eat in Hell When Passing Through”) they are loathe to give out bad commentary. Heck if Tony James says something critical about the book he reviews, then he can pretty much count on getting the same back for his next book.
And who the heck wants that kind of karma?
June 24th, 2009 at 11:07 am
that’s not really true. Every writer I know has trashed another writer in a review. It doesn’t _always_ come back to bite you. Sure, stuff happens, but most writers know and accept how it works. Many of us are adults, you know.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Bad commentary doesn’t make for an interesting review. Neither does good commentary. Commentary isn’t interesting.
The National Post blog is doing a good job these days with the buy it/skip it, as well as ongoing author interviews etc. And not just the predictable big press line up either. Nice to see.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Totally agree. I miss Ian Brown and his round table. Shelagh Roger’s show is just about Shelagh more than anything else. I wish Book Time/Between the Covers was back on the radio and not just on satellite/podcast.
I hardly ever listen to CBC any more.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Whetter knows that Milgaard didn’t do it, right?