Should a Friend Review a Friend’s Book?

A friend (I’ll call her A) said recently that she could not review a particular book because she knows the author. Well, I know the author, too, and plan to review the book, so our conversation started me thinking about the ethics of book reviewing, about professionalism in writing and about where lines are and/or should be drawn, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far. (Forgive the analytical approach, please.) I welcome comments and other opinions.

Three basic relevant questions occurred to me.

(1) How well do you know the author and in what context?

In 1988 87% of book critics responding to a survey said that a book review editor should not assign a review to a friend of the author. Hairs were split on how close the friendship would have to be to violate reviewing standards. What about assigning a review to a writer who wrote a similar book or one on the same subject? There 79% said it was fine, because an uninformed review would be worse than one by a jealous competitor. (The reasoning was not phrased exactly as I have phrased it here.) When you think about it, you realize that people working on the same subject in the same field will probably be acquainted; the distinction made is between a “peer review” and a “sweetheart review,” the former a professional necessity, the latter—well, less than completely objective. The distinction, however, seems to sidestep rather than answer the question.

Gail Pool, author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, answered unequivocally in an interview, “No, I don’t think a reviewer should review a friend’s book. The relationship is bound to interfere with her response to the book.” Can a line always be drawn between a relationship between colleagues and a friendship? What do you think?

(2) Are you being paid to review the book? If so, by whom?

The issue of a reviewer’s pay is another relevant factor. A reviewer paid by an author, we would probably all agree, is less likely to be perfectly frank about a book’s shortcomings, but what makes any writer, including a review, “professional” is getting paid. Paid writers of book reviews for newspapers and magazines are expected to uphold journalistic standards of objectivity. A difficulty here, as I see it, is that a review is not simply a report but includes an evaluation by the reviewer-- without an opinion, it is not a review. All reviews, therefore, are at least partially subjective. (Note how often reviewers disagree.) The real questions, therefore, as I see the matter, are whether the reviewer (a) can avoid being unduly biased and (b) will be comfortable in honestly expressing, in public, to a reading audience, her or his views of a friend’s work.

If a professional does it for money and an amateur does it for love--the basic crude distinction--how does that difference affect the honesty we look for in a book review? Does it?

(3) Is your identity hidden or disclosed?

As everyone surely knows by now, anyone can visit the site of a giant online bookseller and post a “review.” You need no credentials (you receive no pay, either), and your name need not appear. Can online ratings be manipulated by fraudulent reviews? If you search online, you will find both advice on how to manipulate ratings for your book and technology offered to prevent such manipulation. Murky waters. What I think of reviewers putting their names on their reviews will be clearer below.

My own situation:

Here are some of the differences between A’s situation and mine, as I see them: (1) She is recognized as a professional writer. I am not. (2) She is paid for her reviews. No one pays me to write my blog. (3) Her reviews are published by newspapers, mine only on my own blog, of which I am the “publisher.”

Here are some ways in which our situations are alike: (1) Good writing--our own and others’--is important to both of us. (2) We try to do our work well (hers paid, mine unpaid). (3) Neither of us would praise a book we considered undeserving of praise, although (4) both of us receive, from time to time, free advance reading copies of books that publishers hope we will review favorably. Finally (and there may be more similarities, but I’ll stop with this one), (5) we put our names, and therefore our reputations, on the line along with our opinions.

(My readership is a tiny fraction of A’s, but my integrity is no less important to me for that. It might be surprising and even amusing to a lot of people how much stubborn pride a small bookseller can have. There’s more than one reason we’re called “independent.”)

Okay, so here’s my bottom line--

Book Reviewing on This Blog:

- "Books in Northport" is more general than a book review blog but occasionally posts reviews. I write one from time to time, as does my bookstore volunteer, and at least one was contributed by a good friend whose only other connection to Dog Ears Books is as a customer.
- I don’t review books by request--only when the spirit moves me.
- I don’t review every book I read or even every book I love madly. Just don’t want to be that tied down. This blog is not an assignment from someone else. Here, as in my bookstore, I am my own boss, and here in my blog the whole world is potentially my oyster. The number of possible topics is infinite.
- Most of the time, if I don’t care for a book I don’t bother writing about it, unless there is something in it so troubling to me that I want to get my view of it “out there.”
- When the author is a friend of mine, you’ll know that, too. (An example of a review with such disclosure can be found here.) Sometimes writers have found me through my blog and sent books to me, although we have never met. Sometimes I’ll review an older book rather than a new one, simply because it speaks to me in some important way. Only on occasion do books come to me directly from publishers (who send only the book--no check!), and never is there an intermediate publisher, such as a newspaper, paying me for what I write.
- If I review a new book, it’s going to be one I hope to sell in my bookstore because it's a book I think deserves an audience and one I judge to be well worth its cover price. I don’t “push” books I don’t believe in. My integrity as a writer and my integrity as a bookseller are not in conflict. And this, really, is my bottom line.

Behind the Blade

Let's hear it for the guys who drive the plow trucks! Without Benny this morning, I would never have made it out the driveway and into Northport to open my bookstore!

Booklovers, Browsers, Cash Customers Welcome; Cell Phone Pirates and Freeloaders, Not

There are some people I don’t want in my bookstore at all, and one of them is a nationally known book author. Can you believe this story? The man wrote a book and presumably he wants people to read it, and yet he and his wife visited a bookstore, sat on the floor, piled up books all around them, took pictures of pages with their cell phones and left without buying a thing, having harvested all they wanted for free. To top it all off, now the guy asks, “Did we do anything wrong?” You messy, rude, inconsiderate, free-loading cheapskate! Do you really need to ask? Is this how your parents raised you, or has modern technology really made you (the question you ask in your book, which I only know from reading the reviews and a book which I will now never read) stupid? Note to guy's publisher: Do not send me a review copy. If this is the future, let me live in the past until I die.

Conglomeration of Bits of Book News

No, this post will not contain news of huge chains emerging or submerging or publishing houses being taken over by Hollywood studios or anything like that—just some stray tidbits from my current book life as evidence that I am still alive and reading, despite the remodeling uproar at home. First, however, one news item from the larger world, the cancellation of the Cairo Book Fair. For years the largest literary event in the Arab world, this year the CBF has fallen apart, a victim to protests, unrest, curfews and all the rest of what’s going in Egypt this week. Okay, I know it’s just a book fair. Seeing these women behind a table stacked with books brings it home, though, reminding me that every large, cataclysmic, world-historical event is connected to many smaller upsets and disappointments in the lives of ordinary people. Let’s hope the consequences of the present upheaval in Egypt will bring about a better future.

Back to Leelanau County, the group I still think of as “our Ulysses group” got together last night for the second of four meetings to discuss Anna Karenina. Last night was Parts III and IV, in three weeks we will cover Parts V and VI, and for our last official conversation on this book, along with Parts VII and VIII, we will have a Russian potluck dinner. Herring, anyone? Discussion of Tolstoy's novel has been more free in form than organized but feels productive to all of us, as we argue over each character's virtues and vices and try to see them in the context of Russian history at that time. Did Tolstoy judge his characters? Specifically, did he condemn Anna? And in the unsettled times of the novel's setting, was there a single happy character?

Since the Leelanau Township Library is closed for the month of February (wall paint and carpeting from 1968 crying out to be replaced), the library book discussion group is slated to meet at Dog Ears Books to talk over The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, so wildly successful in its original hardcover version that the paperback (echoing the history of Dan Brown's best-selling Da Vinci Code) , first scheduled for January 2011 publication, has been pushed back until April. I’m not sure what I think of the novel or of the publishing decision, but I’m several chapters in now and curious where the various characters will go.

Meanwhile, The Wild Marsh, by Rick Bass, is waiting patiently and calling my name from one of the home shelves, while here at the Leland Public Library today I was distracted from blogging by rows and rows of books within easy reach. Uncle Tungsten, by Oliver Sacks, was one I selected to take home, along with Roy Reed’s Looking for Hogeye. In general, memoirs are speaking very directly to me lately.

Along those lines, I loved Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s An Accidental Autiobiography for many reasons. One, though I’ve never been a big sports fan, was her writing about Red Barber:

...You could smell the hot dogs and the sweet green grass.

...You could see the game better when Red Barber was broadcasting it on radio than you can see it now on television....

I devoured her stories of India, appreciating the way an exotic present can transport one back to one’s particular domestic past:

I take leave of my surroundings and find myself back in my childhood. I feel a strong and sudden yearning for a Brooklyn neighborhood, a frame house. . . . Of course! It is the smell of elephants. The smell of elephants is the smell of the Prospect Park Zoo. I see myself quite clearly, a little girl in a pink pinafore holding her father’s hand, standing in front of he elephant cages. And it is in that moment that a herd of elephants appears in our headlights (I think drowning must be like this). Peacocks and jungle fowl agitate the tall grass.

In the chapter called “Men and God(s),” I could not help a few small black dots in the margins, such as the one next to this sentence: “Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place.”

She continues:

With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of mute sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel around which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain....

Friends who have known me for decades (I’ve calmed down a little over the years) will not be surprised that this sentence spoke to me: “My love for him always had a religious fervor and intensity (and sometimes an edgy religious hysteria).”

I also loved the way this author quoted repeatedly from the work of Gaston Bachelard, one of the only philosophers my beloved artist husband can bear to read—indeed, a philosopher whose words and thoughts he has come to love.

Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms,” we learn to “abide” within ourselves. . . . Come what may, the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The world can be difficult, but it is our home. Again and again I come back to this. Home.

The big snowstorm passed over Leelanau County, but we have plenty of clean snow on all sides. Today we had bright sunshine, blue skies and white, white scenery.

Take a Road Trip (I’m Too Busy)

Our house is in an uproar, with boxes of dishes and boxes of cans and boxes of utensils all over the house (everywhere but in the kitchen), and we are busy, busy, busy. I spent four hours Saturday at my bookstore and had some visitors and sold a few books, but the main focus of the weekend has been and continues to be our house, as you see here.













So what I’m suggesting is that you visit a few bookstores in Washington, D.C. and some if not all of the other blogs listed in the right-hand column of this page. I just don’t have time (or energy) to write more today.

How Much Shelf Space Is Enough?

In a recent post and comments following, there was the beginning of a discussion of books in their role of furnishing our homes. After Walt estimated bookshelf footage in his house, I was curious and, borrowing David’s tape measure and then rounding off and estimating and multiplying from there, I came up with a figure of 75 feet in our old farmhouse. I think I may have forgotten a very full bookcase upstairs in the guest room, but the figure seems close enough. And then (funny how this works out) the very next evening David decided we had to rearrange one of our rooms, which involved moving the larger of two bookcases there from one wall to another opposite. Everything had to be taken off the shelves so the heavy piece of furniture could be moved—and thoroughly dusted!

No, our shelves are not French chalked quarter-sawn oak. They are homemade, pine boards with particleboard backing, and while if you look very hard, you might find one or two leatherbound books, you would also find books that lost their binding long ago. Here’s one:



This is an example of a book not good enough to put out for sale at Dog Ears and too good to toss in the recycling bin. (Robert Burns! Trash, never! I cannot believe I missed his birthday!) Any decorator who inspected our bookshelves would have palpitations, for sure.

While we did organize a little bit (very roughly) in reshelving these books, some titles defy category. Where would you put Without Machinery, an old upper grade school social studies book?


Such a charming book! The chapter I've opened to here, about nomadic reindeer herders in Lapland, is titled "The Winter Home." Our winter home is mostly the central room in our house, while the front porch and the outdoors are our summer home.


Would you put “books by people we know” all together on a shelf or separate them according to whether they are fiction, poetry, memoir or whatever? A couple of my favorite children’s books make special any spot they occupy.


My cookbooks have a separate little bookcase in this same room. (Don’t ask me why my big French dictionaries are with the cookbooks.)


There are more bookcases in our living room, in David’s office, in the “cozy room” and in the upstairs guest room. In our bedroom we have to stack books on our dressers. These are books we’re reading at bedtime, either silently to ourselves or aloud to each other. And now we are in the throes of making ready to tear out our old kitchen, which was the inspiration for last night’s reorganization: our dining table had to move so it wouldn’t be in the way of outgoing cupboards and incoming sheets of drywall, and the bookcase and leather chairs had to move to make room for the dining table. I’m not posting pictures of the room because we have yet to repaint the walls and floors, but already we like the new configuration. “We were getting in a rut,” we agreed. The only problem so far is that there is no room for the little lamp-and-book table that used to sit between our two reading chairs.

Can we live without a place to stack up books? Or will our dining table gradually disappear from view and the future find us with our plates on our laps?

What Is the Most Depressing Novel You Have Ever Read?

One Northport friend said Anna Karenina was the most depressing book she’d ever read. Oh, surely not! My own candidates for that honor would be John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, Richard Wright’s Native Son (both great American novels) or anything at all by Joyce Carol Oates. Another friend chose Kafka’s The Trial as the most depressing novel he’d ever read, and then one of the younger generation chimed in with Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser. We will never have consensus, but it's fascinating to see the roster of candidates take shape.

How about you? What is the most depressing novel of your lifetime's reading so far, and are you glad you read it, despite the feeling you had during and after the experience? Do depressing novels seem more literary? Literary novels more depressing? What's the best novel you've ever read that had a happy ending? Can a novel be both depressing and happily ended?

I need to stop! My head is spinning, and the questions are proliferating like wire coat hangers in an empty closet!

Trying Out Snowshoes

There would be more pictures and a much more complete photo-essay if David had gone out in the cold with me farther than our front walk. I did go way out in the meadow with Sarah, but this you'll have to accept on faith, because there are no pictures of us out there. I have not tried any steep hills yet. Two criteria for success were met this first time out (Sunday): (1) keeping my feet in the snowshoes and (2) not falling down. Shall I try hill-climbing the next time out?

Books for Looks?

This was our Saturday afternoon homecoming. Can you blame us for staying home on Sunday with books, magazines and old newspapers?

A friend who braved the weather yesterday to visit Dog Ears Books brought me a section of the New York Times from earlier this month. For those of you who missed the article my friend knew would interest me, “Selling a Book by Its Cover,” you can find it online here.


The idea is that a well-stocked library is part of the design of a house. It’s part of interior decoration:

Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.

It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé....

Not all clients rule out the possibility of reading their home décor--some, for instance, want only books in English for that very reason—but others are happy to have stacks of books all wrapped in white (or black) as “design elements” in a room where nothing is left to chance, presumably in a house where every tschoschke and its position on a table has been carefully planned. (I guess some people really live like this.) My friend was appalled and thought I would be, too. Well, I can’t see much value in books as nothing more than stacks of white or black, but shelves of real, readable books? Maybe someone will read them—if not the people who paid for the house, then their guests or their grandchildren.


But are we, as one trend-spotter in the article claimed, turning codices (the old word codex is now new again, distinguishing a printed, bound book from an e-book) into fetishes? Fetish! That’s pretty loaded language. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing and making an argument, I looked around my own house and came up with more questions. Why do we photograph natural objects and put those photographs on our walls? Why do we (some of us) have stones and shells and animal bones on our bookshelves, along with the books. Is that small mammal skull a fetish? Those deer jawbones? (Where did my deer jawbones get to, anyway?) Is there something all of these objects on shelves have in common?


[Caveat, disclaimer, disclosure, whatever: There has never been an interior decorator involved in our house. I probably don’t need to say so. Surely our books and bookshelves speak for themselves. Just remember that that’s beside the point, okay? Don’t get distracted! What do books, shells, stones and skulls have in common?]

Here’s what I think. We are physical inhabitants of a physical world and also spiritually connected both to one another and to other aspects of the world, and so we bring into our individual home spaces some of the objects from the larger world that make that larger world our home, too. This stone connects me to a beach covered now by snow and ice. A walk on another beach hundreds of miles away turned up this shell. Finding jawbones of a deer down by the creek years ago, I felt my connection to an individual animal I might never have seen but who was, for a while, a neighbor, and the little raccoon (possum?) also was another being like us, once warm and alive, needing food and shelter. Like these animals, we will one day lose our warmth and life, but even then, like the stone and the shell and bones, we will leave some traces behind.


Every book on the shelf contains human life. Traces, lives, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, events. Readers and non-readers alike sense that books connect us to other human beings in our own and in earlier times, every book a product of other inhabitants of our home, this earth. Wanting them around us, it seems to me, is recognition of their value. Whether or not it constitutes fetishism, I leave for others to decide.

I am fairly well convinced, though, that I need to make crisp new dust jackets for the 25-volume set of the complete works of Mark Twain in my bookshop, its covers worn and faded by the years. A lot of people do judge books by their covers--at least, the cover gives them their first impression--and to many the look of the books on their shelves is important, so Mark Twain needs a facelift. Unless someone comes in to buy the set before I get around to the beautification project. And I have all those stones and shells and bones to handle and rearrange before I start making dust jackets. First things first.

Looking Backwards Through Blizzard Days

My guess is that everyone is pretty fixated on the weather this weekend, so that’s what I’ll feature. Today’s headline photo is of Dog Ears Books. I’m inside! Sarah’s inside! I go out to clear the sidewalk, and within minutes it’s covered again with snow.


We drove through a lot of snow to get here.

Even the driveway was a challenge, though it had been plowed 30 hours or so before.


Here are some ducky scenes from yesterday in Northport. The ducks act like they've seen it all before.



The big snow started on Thursday afternoon about 3 p.m. Here are a couple of snapshots along the path from Northport to home on Thursday.



Finally, in my backward look over the last four days, I offer two Friesian horses in their paddock on Wednesday, one kicking up excited heels, the other regarding the weather with a stoic expression. Is there anything more beautiful than a black horse running in fresh, white snow? Well, there's Sarah. I bet she would love to run around with the lively horse.