Saturday, May 03, 2008

Book Reviewing

Hilda had a badge on her blog that links to the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews. They're concerned because many newspapers such as The Atlanta Journal Constitution are simply eliminating the book reviewer position from their newspapers. If they are still publishing book reviews, they are getting them from national services. I find this to be a disservice to both local audiences and local authors. The importance of the local book reviewer has always been to let his or her audience know about books that would be of interest to the local community. This is often the only way a local author has of getting noticed as many of them will rarely show up in national review sources. I find this a disturbing trend and hope it doesn't continue. I know our local paper has often been a source of information on Alabama authors for me -- I don't have time or the inclination to hunt all these authors down, so learning about a possibly interesting book in the paper is important to me. I wouldn't have known about Ravi Howard's Like Trees, Walking about the Michael Donald murder, a subject of interest to me, if it hadn't been for our local paper. So I wish the NBCC luck with their campaign.

Friday Shuffle
  1. Bad Habit: Joss Stone from Introducing Joss Stone
  2. Happy Girl: Martina McBride from Greatest Hits
  3. My Dream: The Platters from Enchanted: the Best of the Platters
  4. Begin the Beguine: Sheryl Crow from De-Lovely
  5. Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out: Eric Clapton from Unplugged
  6. What am I Living For?: Van Morrison from Pay the Devil
  7. Late Breaking News: Jorma Kaukonen from Stars in My Crown
  8. Wayfaring Stranger: Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs from Heartaches and Highways
  9. Cloud 9: Rahsaan Patterson from Wines & Spirits
  10. Honestly OK: Dido from No Angel

1 comment:

RajLibrarian said...

It is indeed heartening to note that book reviews are slowly getting abondoned!....

Look at my blog and I love to have your obervations and comments :
http://lisreviews.blogspot.com

and

http://indialibrarian-intl.blogspot.com

RajLibrarian
lotus5673@yahoo.co.in