What is book criticism for?

On why thinking of reviews as ads or mere opinions shortchanges literary culture

Earlier this month, the Associated Press—arguably the country’s top wire service, with stories syndicated in more than 1,000 outlets—announced that it would soon cease running book reviews. In a memo to their freelance book critics, the AP wrote, “This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.”

The AP’s decision to cut their weekly book review section comes amid a deeper push away from substantive cultural criticism in major media. Both The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times have eliminated their film critic roles (“If they made Siskel and Ebert today it would be two empty chairs,” critic Sam Adams points out.) Vanity Fair is also scaling back reviews, and let go their chief critic Richard Lawson. The New York Times has reassigned several cultural critics and is essentially pulling a pivot to video away from traditional reviews.

But back to books, since I make my living primarily as a freelance book critic. When the AP news made the rounds on Bluesky on August 10, my freelance book critic group chat commiserated over the news, and in particular over one author’s profoundly bad take on it. In response to a thread by journalist Mark Harris, who pointed out that “People complain about critics as gatekeepers; wait until all that's left is marketing,” this author claimed that “The trouble is it’s already all just marketing[.] A book does well when there are marketing dollars behind it not when there are good reviews behind it and we’ve been in this place for a while[.]”

I’ve written before about this very issue, and I agree that marketing plays an outsize role in how books perform. But what really pissed me off was what this author had to say next:

(A disclaimer here that I do not know this author and have never read any of her books—perhaps they are brilliant! I’m singling her out 1) because her thoughts on what book reviews are for clearly illustrate what I see as a common and dangerous devaluation of criticism and 2) because she doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on her point over the course of two days of Bad Posts in response to a publicist, Michael Taeckens, who is one of the best in the business and is genuinely dedicated to serving literary culture.)

Of course every author writes to be read by readers, and we all want to sell copies of our books so we can make a living. But to assume that the only point of a book review is to encourage a potential reader to buy a copy of the book is profoundly wrongheaded and shortsighted.

Book reviews are not advertisements, and books are not merely products. They are not commodities, and they are not consumables that get used up and thrown away, like face cream or paper towels. We should not judge the worth of book criticism by whether or not it moves book sales. When I review a title, I do not do so with the goal of helping the author make sales, though I do often hope that it will help expose their work to readers who might not otherwise encounter it. I see my job as something much more nuanced and multifaceted.

When I review narrative nonfiction, as I do about 75 percent of the time, I aim to engage in an intellectual conversation about the issues and ideas the book takes up, to assess how the book contributes to a body of knowledge and how it pushes forward a new or different way of understanding the topic at hand, and to contextualize how it fits into the wider landscape of the author’s body of work and/or the wider genre it belongs in. I also frequently situate books within the cultural, political, or historical moment they’re appearing in with my own research and reporting, especially when writing about titles that overlap in some way with my own work. This might look like my recent review of two books on adoption fraud, where I laid out the current landscape of how countries are reckoning with international adoption, or like this review where I touched on the history of child welfare in the US. And sometimes I bring in my own personal experiences, as I did with this review of a book about cancer genetics. With fiction and memoir, in addition to contextualizing the book within the author’s oeuvre and genre and wider literary trends, I try to get at how it illuminates a new perspective, opens the reader’s eyes, or makes the reader think or reflect. A good example is this review on a novel that upends status quo ideas about “Trump Country.” And on top of all of that, I’m picking apart how the book ticks, craft-wise, and assessing how well it lives up to its own intentions.

This is not to say that I see my work as a critic as objective—it’s obviously subjective, and my own individual tastes are reflected in what I choose to write about and how I critique it. That’s an important part of my job! But, as Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in “A Critic’s Manifesto,” which I teach whenever I teach cultural criticism, what gives the professional critic’s opinions heft is how they are grounded by knowledge:

To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period. For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing by readers isn’t criticism proper.) Nor are those who have tremendous erudition but lack the taste or temperament that could give their judgment authority in the eyes of other people, people who are not experts. (This is why so many academic scholars are no good at reviewing for mainstream audiences.) Like any other kind of writing, criticism is a genre that one has to have a knack for, and the people who have a knack for it are those whose knowledge intersects interestingly and persuasively with their taste.

This is why traditional book reviews cannot just be replaced by Goodreads¹, where the vast majority of people simply give books arbitrary star ratings² and where text reviews are 99% dedicated entirely to the reader’s personal experience of reading and idiosyncratic opinions. (Of course it’s true that there are people on Goodreads who are also writing substantive criticism, but they are typically not doing so on that platform, and they are the exception to the rule.)

Professional book critics blend their idiosyncratic reactions to the work at hand with the knowledge they have accrued about literature. At their best, book reviews make readers think in the same way that books make readers think. They illuminate new ways of understanding the world and open up conversations. They deepen readers’ knowledge and help them develop their own ideas and opinions about the books they read—indeed, I often read reviews after I have already read a book, and I know plenty of other people do this too.

As an author, I of course always hope to sell more books, and want people to read my book. But for me one of the most meaningful parts of publishing The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow has been receiving traditional reviews from people with the knowledge to make their critiques really meaningful, like sociologist Gretchen Sisson and adoptee and author Alice Stephens.

And while I wish I didn’t have to constantly defend my profession and its value, I’d like to thank that stubborn author on Bluesky who insists critics don’t support readers and have no purpose for making me really think about why I’m so passionate about writing and reading reviews.

1. a hellscape owned by Amazon!

2. I am nevertheless on this hellscape, but when I rate books there I pretty much always give them 5 stars because authors deserve a little grade inflation as a treat and because tons of people are like “I loved this book, 2 stars”