If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’d remember that I used to post multiple book reviews a week. The apex was probably toward the end of my time at Dallas Seminary and then first couple of years teaching. Over time, work responsibilities and life events squeezed out the margins for writing time, although the reading habit has stuck.
Recently, I’ve been wanting to integrate a writing routine back into my schedule. I really did enjoy reading and reviewing books, but I’ve noticed that it’s not what it was 3 or 4 years ago. Back then, there were several of us who posted reviews regularly on our personal blogs, and it was a genre of writing that could almost sustain a blog on its own. Now, I’m not sure that’s the case, and it’s probably for the best.
As I’ve been trying to understand this shift, I’ve been thinking about the whole writing of reviews itself. Part of why it has been hard to start them up with regularity again is that their purpose is hard to nail down. Especially when you’re not taking the time to produce an academic level review, or even review article, it can be hard to know what you’re doing beyond just giving a summary and some analysis.
Perhaps there is really nothing beyond that, and maybe that’s ok. It still serves to help promote the book, which the publishers that have sent you free books appreciate. It helps clarify your own thoughts and helps you process what you’ve read, which I think is always a good exercise. But, something about it all was still bothering me and keeping me from jumping back in the game.
I finally figured out what it was when I was reading Nassim Taleb’s newest book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. In his introductory section, he actually discusses book reviews, and details the issue that had been eluding me:
Many book reviewers are intellectually honest and straightforward people, but the industry has a fundamental conflict with the public, even while appointing itself as representative of the general class of readers. For instance, when it comes to books written by risk takers, the general public (and some, but very few, book editors) can detect what is interesting to them in a certain account, something those in the fake space of word production (in other words, nondoers) chronically fail to get—and they cannot understand what it is that they don’t understand because they are not really part of active and transactional life (43-44)
Here, Taleb is bringing in a distinction from earlier in the introduction: “Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk” (28). As it applies to book reviewing, it is a way of saying that if you don’t have “skin in the game,” when it comes to the subject of the book, your opinion of its merits is not as valuable. What I think that means is that if you’re not involved in the world that the book is addressing, your understanding of its value is severely limited. Or, one could say that the more time you have on hand to read and review books, the less valuable your opinion on them is.
In my experience, the more embedded you are in higher academics—and I can only speak in relation to theology and biblical studies—the harder it is to judge what is interesting or helpful to a “normal” person. You can excel at comparing a book to its field of literature, because you’re extremely well-read. But unless you’re actively pastoring or teaching, it’s hard to say what’s going to be an interesting and/or useful book to the person in the pew (or the pastor in the pulpit).
There’s a related issue when it comes to the reviewing of books. Here’s Taleb again:
There is, here again, a skin-in-the-game problem: a conflict of interest between professional reviewers who think they ought to decide how books should be written, and genuine readers who actually read books because they like to read books. For one, reviewers command an unchecked and arbitrary power over authors: someone has to have read the book to notice that a reviewer is full of baloney…Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well written they are, never in how they map to the book (unless of course the author makes them accountable for misrepresentations) (44).
Near the end of that quote, he hits another issue I’ve bumped up against. If you haven’t read the book I’m reviewing, you really can’t tell if I’m just I’m shoveling bs the whole way through it. You can trust that I wouldn’t do that, but you also can’t tell very well. Certainly a peer reviewed book review could bypass this issue, but as I understand it, they aren’t peer reviewed in the same way articles are.
In any case, as I’ve thought more on the subject, I may shift ultimately from primarily producing reviews of books to producing articles interacting with them. In cases when a publisher has sent the book to me, it will always be noted. In my mind, this is perhaps a better way to showcase the value of the book. Maybe we could think of it as analysis in context minus the summary. Honestly, you don’t need the book summary, you should be able to figure that out from glancing at the table of contents in the Amazon preview. Or, to put it another way, in most books I can write a decent summary from the table of contents and introduction alone.
And that brings perhaps the last issue to mind. In most cases, it’s not necessary to read an entire book to produce a thoughtful 1000 words on the value of the book. The longer the book is, the more true this is. If I can get 200-300 words from just the front and back matter, table of contents, and introduction, then that leaves 700-800 words for the rest of the book. That means I’ll have to be particularly selective of what chapters I’ve dive into for more analysis. In doing so, it would be hard for you to tell whether those were the chapters that stuck out to me, or whether those were the only chapters I happened to read.
In the end, I don’t think it particularly matters, so long as I am highlighting what is interesting and valuable about the book for the everyday person. Rather than continuing the insularity of reading and reviewing theology and biblical studies books, I’d like to broaden the horizon. I’ve gotten a little more skin in the game over the past several years from teaching and being non-staff in the local church. Life events have also sharpened my focus a bit. So, let’s see how it plays it out this spring as I start cranking through the stacks of books I need to tell you about.