Fifty Hours on Planes (or more) and a Theory of Travel: Honeymoon Part 1

Flight supplies.

By the time we landed back in Boston, at the end of a roughly 40 hour November 3rd, Rissa and I had been in flight for 50 hours or more over the course of 2 ½ weeks. Some of that time was spent productively; Rissa actually knit the pair of gloves she would wear for the trip and I got some reading and writing done, but there's a point where the productive parts of the brain just shut down and, depending on where you are in your travels and how well you can sleep on a plane (which for Rissa and I, not particularly well at all.) you can end up with a lot of dead time.

How did I spend that dead time. Well: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The LOTR Trilogy (original cinematic releases, which are not as good as the extended releases), Pacific Rim, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, some Wolverine-based abomination, and maybe one or two more. It was easily the most movies I've watched over that stretch of time, probably in my whole life.

There's a lot to consider in this display.

The travel itself, was, of course, exhausting and if we had any “dark nights of the soul” on our adventure, they came on our trip from Boston to Cairns. Our flight out of Boston was delayed almost an hour, which meant that when we landed in San Francisco we had 15 minutes to make our connection. Thus began the legendary San Francisco Sprint! I'm not going to lie, I miss playing sports, and so a part of me kind of appreciated the chance to tear ass through the airport. And running on a people mover makes you feel like a superhero. We even had a “Go! Just leave me!” moment when I totally ditched Rissa (at her rational insistence) to try and get there in time to hold the plane. We did, though, thanks to the delay, we hadn't eaten since about ten in the morning. Luckily Air New Zealand serves good food and free wine. Seriously, after dinner service flight attendants walked up and down the aisles with bottles of wine.

And then the flight from Auckland to Cairns. Really, there was nothing wrong with it. Another perfectly lovely flight with another free meal. (Making for the rare no-lunch-3-breakfast 36 hours.) The failure was in our awareness of geography. The times on the tickets implied to us (who didn't think about it for a goddamn second) that it was a short three hour flight. If we had taken a tiny fraction of an instant to look at a freakin' map, we would have seen there was no way it could be a three-hour flight. It was a six-hour flight. Those last three hours were agonizing. We were so exhausted that we couldn't even make it through the New Zealand vs. Australia rugby game that was on a giant freaking screen in a bar in Australia later that night. (And it was such a good game! Or, at least the first half was.)

But I always reminded myself every time the travel started getting gross, of one fact; for the vast majority of human history, what we just did was impossible.

This is "flyover country" in New Zealand

Though I wasn't quite as productive as I'd hoped to be across those 50 plus hours, I did get some thinking done about travel itself, specifically, about why travel is so vital to some people, while others despise it. Whether it's new places or new people, newness puts you on your guard. That's just basic evolution. Being on guard has, essentially, two different emotional expressions; anxiety and alertness. How you feel about travel is likely to be determined by the balance of those two states in your mind. Honestly, I feel a lot of anxiety when I travel (I tend to get to airports very early), but the balance of my experience is alertness, a drive to observe, to see all that is around me, to “get a handle” on a place. There are plenty of times when I travel, when a nervousness builds in my stomach, but, to me, there is such a primal joy in seeing something I've never seen before that I pretty much always push through it.

Of course, the tragedy (probably too strong a word) is that those who, on balance, experience more anxiety will have the least motivation to push through their anxiety to experience the benefits of being alert, and because anxiety and alertness are self-reinforcing, all it takes is a slight balance one way or the other. The anxiety balance will elucidate all of the potential risks, thus increasing the anxiety, while the alertness balance will keep the mind open for all that is new and exciting happening around it.

Now that I'm reflecting on this idea, it really isn't limited to travel. Any new experience with virtually any level of potency, with inspire your brain to ask either “Will it kill me?” or “Can I kill it?” leveraging our evolved intelligences to either enumerate all the reasons to get out of dodge or observe with an inspired focus the environment around you. And from that, so much of how you experience the world and what you will experience follows.

On the flight home I found my relationship to the time line of this trip odd, almost paradoxical. On the one hand after months of planning, suddenly it's over. All the time from the first conversation to that moment on the plane felt like an extracted tooth; it's there and then it's gone. In contrast, it also felt like we landed in Cairns months ago. The same experience felt instant and extended.

Also, I bought shoes. Weird, huh.

Perhaps it is simply that so much of that time was filled with so much activity that my perception recalibrated it to more closely match my activity-per-day average. I did more in that block of time than maybe I have ever done in a similar block of time, and so, almost the way time and space interact, my sense of that time is partially expressed by the activities themselves. Also, over the course of that time, we developed and redeveloped our daily routines, a process usually not so quickly repeated. And, in that much of how we experience our lives comes from our daily routines, it is almost as though Riss and I went through four major passages in life.

There are, of course, other ideas that came to me as I traveled, because, well, that's how I see the world, but I'll get to those when I write about the specific cities we visited. If there is one final lesson, Riss and I might have gleaned from the travel is that we can take it and it's worth it. There were times when it sucked, when it was uncomfortable, when it was close to miserable (though, watching that Wolverine movie was my own fault) but, every bit of it was worth it. Hong Kong, Singapore, or Tokyo, or Spain here we come.

Weird Travel Experience 1: I have a pretty good sense of direction that I always assumed was simply based on remembering the turns I'd taken or, if I've looked at a map, being able to keep track of that map while I walk, but now I suspect it might actually be..magnetism. Because I seriously completely lost all sense of direction in the Southern Hemisphere.

Pre-Order My Book! (With Bonus Industry Wonkiness)

I have probably been somewhat neglectful in waiting this long to formally post this information, but, there was a honeymoon involved and some proofreading and some, well, pretty basic reluctance to engage in any kind of overt self-promotion. So....

Holy crap, guys. This is my book.

Pre-order my book here from Porter Square Books. I will sign books ordered from PSB, just put "signed" in the order comment. I'll also add any personalization or message you like. Just put that request in the comments field as well. (One of you is getting a “mint condition copy of the book, suitable for preserving in a shadow-box," but you don't have to put anything in the comments field. I know who you are.) If you are big into shopping local, go here and find your local indie bookstore. There are, of course, other options, and if any of those options are your preferred option just cut and paste “An Exaggerated Murder by Josh Cook” into the search engine of your choice and you'll find it. And, for you digital readers, the e-book will be available in all the major formats. (Pre-orderable, preferably here of course.)

And yes, pre-orders are important. Here's why. (This is the bonus wonkiness.)

Publishing and selling a book is a gamble—investment. Investment. No matter how much data they might have and no matter how much experience they may have, publishers and bookstores pretty much just guess how many copies a book will sell. For the publisher, each and every book is a multi-thousand (or million) dollar gamble—investment. Investment. Pre-orders lessen the risk of these investments in three ways.

Sorry. Just wanted to look at it again. Holy crap! My book!

First pre-orders represent an early return on investment. One of the biggest challenges publishers face (that bookstores don't quite so much) is the sheer distance between the investment and the return. Typically, the time between the initial expense of an author advance (I'm not even counting the cost of an acquisitions editor) and actual sales of the book is a year at minimum, a year in which the publisher pretty much spends money constantly on the book. And even once sales begin, publishers really don't know what they've made back from their investment until months after the book has been released. It is a lot of time to keep the lights on. Pre-orders inject early cash into the economic equation of bookselling. (Via money to bookstores who then pay publishers.)

Second, pre-orders give at least a glimpse of how the book will sell. Before anything organic can build, before booksellers start handselling, and before reviews start coming in, pre-orders give the publisher a sense of what kind of sales the book (and author) can generate pretty much on their own. They reflect an existing fan base. That information is extremely useful in, not just setting a publicity budget for the book, but in determining how and where to spend it. It can also be very useful in deciding where to send an author or tour or even if to send an author on tour.

Yep. Author photo. Yep.

Finally, they encourage book stores to order more copies and the more copies there are in circulation the more likely the book will sell well. ("Stack 'em high and watch 'em fly," is a real thing said about selling books.) It really is truly amazing how many books are not sold, just because there wasn't a copy of the book on the shelf, at the moment. I mean, books aren't fish. If you wanted it on Friday, it'll still be good on Tuesday. But many, many people just won't wait a weekend. If the book isn't there when they want to buy it, they just won't buy it. But if a store has five pre-orders for a book, odds are pretty good the store will order ten, or even fifteen. And if a store starts out with five or ten books on the shelf, they will be less likely to run out of copies before they have a chance to restock, and thus, less likely to lose those impulse sales.

Of course publishing is still a gamble—investment. Investment. But, pre-orders do help mitigate that risk, so if you're a fan of an author or want to support that author, pre-ordering their book is a great way to do it. (Here's that link to my book again, you know, just in case you were waiting to see how the wonkiness went before pulling the trigger.) 

Sorry. It's just a real thing that is real and I like to look at it being real. 

(And it's a wicked cool cover).

My Super Cynical Simon & Schuster/Amazon Contract Theory

I'll take it with 2 sugars & 1 cynicism.

Apparently, the world of publishing doesn't go on vacation whenever I do. Things, with a flagrant disregard for my opinion, happen without me. The biggest news in my time away was the shockingly swift signing of a new contract between Amazon and Simon & Schuster. Given Amazon's notorious secrecy, I doubt we will ever know anything about the negotiation process, though, once we see how prices and discounts on S&S's books on Amazon work out, we'll be able to extrapolate much of the terms of the deal. Most likely, the course of the negotiation and the reason for Amazon's swift acceptance of the contract, follows one of the trajectories outlined by Dennis Johnson. I suppose it also could be possible that S&S discovered and eliminated the legendary “inefficiency” in publishing and so will be able to continue producing books while meeting Amazon's price requirements. (They didn't, because that's not possible. But even if they did, they couldn't share it with other publishers. More on that below.) And, because Amazon is sustained by share-prices rather than profits, whatever happened, must have something to do with Wall Street perception. But I have a more cynical theory.

Trigger Warning: This theory is really cynical.

Here are the two facts on which I base my theory. (the cynicism I earned through years of reading the news.) First, the DOJ lawsuit and the bizarrely aggressive letter the DOJ sent to the publishers involved in that suit before the latest round of negotiations began, mean that publishers are going to be terrified of doing anything that could remotely be considered collusion. This means that even if there is an obvious best course of action to take, a course they would individually choose based on its own merits, they will be nervous to take it, because if they all take it, they will get sued. Which could mean, that each publisher will be limited by what the preceding publisher does. Which is a difficult place to negotiate from. For example, there is a good chance that Simon & Schuster was nervous about holding out as Hachette has done for no other reason than holding out for any reason, even completely different reasons than Hachette, could trigger an investigation. Second, Amazon's “Gazelle Project” is based on exploiting weaker publishers for better terms.

You ready? This is seriously cynical. OK.

It says "See Josh's post" right here.

Amazon is turning Hachette into a gazelle. Every time Amazon quickly comes to terms with another publisher, Hachette looks more and more like the obstinate party in the negotiation. People will wonder why the other publishers were able to reach an agreement but Hachette was not. The low price at any cost crowd will begin to crow about just how much Hachette is trying to squeeze from the unsuspecting public. In the eyes of the public, as opposed to industry members, Hachette will look less and less like a defender of culture and more and more like a profit hungry “$10 billion company.”


Furthermore, Amazon can live without Hachette forever and Hachette can only live without Amazon for some amount of time. As part of an informal industry-wide effort to protect the sustainability of the publishing, that amount of time could be years, but eventually, someone is going to have to pay Hachette's utility bills. Furthermore, agents, who, yes, are human beings who, like authors, need to eat, will eventually avoid signing with Hachette (and its imprints) because of how limited the sales are going to be. Meaning that, if my super cynical theory holds, along with the sales drain directly caused by Amazon, Hachette will also suffer from a talent drain, meaning that, there is a chance Hachette could suffer losses long after any contract is signed with Amazon. And then Hachette is a gazelle. And then, through one process or another, the world will have four major publishers and Amazon will only need four contracts. Told you it was cynical.

I'd love to be cynical just to feel something.

I don't know if there's a “ray of hope” in this piece, but I will say it could all change when it is Penguin Random House's turn to negotiate. Given the disaster that was its “phone,” and the more general slow shaking of investor confidence, I don't think even Amazon could go without roughly 25% of all English language publishing for very long. I mean, wasn't that the point of the merger? Penguin Random House could potentially force Amazon's hand, and if that happens after another quarter of ridiculous losses, we might actually hit some kind of turning point in publishing.

Or the Justice Department could sue. (Cynical, remember.)

(What should we do about this? Same thing we should do every day, Pinky, buy books from independent bookstores.)

How to Read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

The American education system is more than proficient in teaching literacy. In just a few generations, we have created a society with essentially universal literacy. Not every American student receives the same quality of education and not every American student gets to the end of their formal education with the same level of literacy skills, but the vast majority of Americans have enough basic literacy skills to fill out job applications and read road signs and menus. But literacy is not reading and the skills it takes to extract meaning from a menu can be very different from the skills it takes to extract meaning from a novel, poem, essay, or story. Unfortunately, though the structure of our schools is clearly great for literacy, its very nature prevents it, on a structural level, from teaching some, if not many, of the skills reading requires.

Before going much further, I should add, that some individual teachers (maybe even many individual teachers) do find ways to teach reading within the structure of the system. Many of us are lucky enough to come out the other side of high school or college with both a love of reading, and the skills we need to get the most out of a wide variety of books and literature. The problem is that not all books fit well into the testing and standards structure of our system. It is relatively easy to extract test questions out of books with Aristotelian plot arcs, accessible prose, a stable conflict through the story, and/or a few relatively overt themes and symbols. Such books have “correct” answers that teachers (or whoever it is that creates “standards”) can reasonably expect their students to ascertain on a first reading and in a short amount of time. There are, of course, many great books that meet these qualifications; (and some great books that appear to enough to be taught even though a lot of weirdness hides under the surface, Edgar Allen Poe, I'm looking at you.) The Great Gatsby springs to mind, but they certainly don't represent all great books. Just as knowing the skills of baseball won't necessarily make you able to play cricket, having the skills to read the kinds of books taught school won't necessarily help you read the discursive, tangential, stylistically challenging, thematically wandering, structurally experimental books, stories, and poems that have been enriching, deepening, pushing, and challenging human expression for millenia. When Ron Charles half jokes that Bailey Prize winning novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimer McBride, will be enjoyed by “dozens” of readers, he is essentially commenting on how few readers get to the end of their reading educations with the right skills to read it. As with our baseball player struggling with a wicked googly, this isn't about the intelligence of readers, but about skill sets.

So, to the best of my ability, here are the techniques and perspectives (because this is as much about what you read for as it is how you read) you need to read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. (Because you should read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.)

Give It Time: How many of the best meals in your life involved a lot of slow processes? If you're a fan of BBQ or stews or pickles or beer, or, well, nearly anything delicious, odds are, at some point, there was a step in the preparation process that took a bit of time. Books can be like that too. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing takes it's time to build up to something (perhaps reflecting the narrator's growing awareness, but this is not the post for interpretation). And you need to give it that time, that room to develop, to grow, to absorb the rich, smoky, flavor of your attention. OK, went a little BBQ on you there at the end, but the point remains. Though many great books hook you, not all do. For some (thinking specifically of Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury (and even Lolita as its oft-quoted first line is not in fact, the first line of the novel. The first line of Lolita is “'Lolita, or the confession of a White Widowed Male' such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates” is. “Preambulates?” “Widowed?” I'm barely going to stop myself from discoursing on the brilliance of that. Barely.) but I'm sure there are others) the act of “hooking” might actually compromise a reader's ability to full experience the story. So, don't be worried if you're not “hooked” by A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. It's not trying to hook you. Just be patient.

Moments Like Paper Boats in a Flood: In case you think its just scattered thoughts, McBride inserts crystalline images and moments that remind you, there is an author here, with a controlled project, who is intentionally guiding the apparently chaotic flow of words and images. These moments don't happen every page, or every other page, or even every chapter, but they happen and they are vital to keeping your brain in “literature mode.” Oh, they're also beautiful and brilliant and you don't want miss beautiful brilliance no matter what other structural and narrative purposes it might serve.

It Is OK To Be Hurt by a Book: Actually it is powerful and important and empowering to be hurt by a book. It is a gift to be hurt by a book. It is proof of humanity to be hurt by a book. Being hurt by a book opens a part of yourself that you need to see. You need to know what hurts you. You need to know how you respond to being hurt. You also need to know what doesn't hurt you, what you think should hurt, but doesn't. And you need to know what “hurt” actually feels like, what the content of it is and how book hurt is different from life hurt. A lot of readers will be uncomfortable with the story's events. Many will be hurt. Be grateful when A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing hurts you.

Let It Go: Sorry to go all Frozen on you, but let it go. This book will not answer test questions. Who is she talking about now, are they still on the bus, is she talking or thinking, wait did her mother say that....Let it go. You will sometimes not know what the narrator is talking about. Let it go. You will sometimes not know if the narrator is talking or thinking. Let it go. You won't be able to pass a pop quiz in the morning, you won't be able to write a two paragraph essay on the source of conflict, and you won't be able to identify the climax. (If there is one.) Let it go. Too often, rather than learning to read, we learn to pass literature tests, and just like there are many brilliant minds that don't test well, there are many brilliant books that don't test well. Let it go. You get through your life without knowing what's going on every second of it; you'll get through A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing the same way.

You'll flounder. You'll struggle. You'll have more passages of confusion than moments of enlightenment. You will wonder how and why anybody can do what was done. You will not know what's going on. But you'll also totally get it even if you can't describe how you get it. Something will stick in your brain and even though the source of that something is made of words, that something will not be made of words and so will just sit there. You will feel a different rhythm of percolation in your own stream of consciousness. And there will be moments that mean nothing to everyone else and something to you, and it's important to have those moments, and I don't think you get enough of those moments in books that test well.

Whenever I write a piece that explores how and what we should read, I feel like there is an implied “so what?” hovering over the piece. So what if most people aren't reading this particular swath of human expression. So what if many, if not most of us, get to the end of our formal education without the tools needed for certain kinds of books. I mean, would we cure cancer if everyone already knew how to read books like A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing? Would we end poverty or war? Would we prevent human driven climate change?

You know, what, yes. We would. Or maybe not those exact problems and probably not all of them, but our problem solving ability, especially given how abstract our massive and interconnected human society is, is contingent on our ability to grapple with distant consequences, assess the value of abstract concepts, critically examine (sometimes even deconstruct) information and media, and imagine solutions outside our vestigial systems of decision-making. In short, the same skills needed to read totally-out-there books like A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

This sounds grandiose, of course, but everything, absolutely everything, is built on decisions made by people and those decisions were built on the memories, emotions, experiences, opinions, and reading skills of the people and limitations in any of those capacities, whether evolved over the course of human history or created idiosyncratically in the individual's environment, limit the decisions. To put this another way, I believe you learn how to make better decisions, and thus, be a better person, by learning how to read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

Impossible to Review

My goal in reviewing a book is to give readers the information they need to decide whether or not they want to read the book, which means I describe the dominant characteristics of the book, while assessing its execution with my, subjective obviously, opinion of quality. Sometimes that also involves placing the book in its historic or literary context, sometimes that means offering some interpretations of the work, and sometimes that means describing more general aspects of literature. My hope, is that I have written enough decision making resources into the review that a reader can decide they really want to read a book I have described as a book I don't think anyone should read. As much as I think Michiko Kakutani generally has regressive taste in books, I always know exactly what my relationship to a book she's reviewed is likely to be.

But not all books have the same “reviewability.” Here are three categories of books that are damn near impossible to review.

Abominations of the Written Word

My actual tongue burst into flames reading those words.

No matter how bad a book is, it is still an act of human creation and, thus, still deserves to be treated with a level of respect. But how do you communicate that respect while also describing a reading experience where you wanted to pull out your eyes with sauce sodden sporks and roll them back and forth between your hands while sitting on the floor waiting for the searing pain in your brain to leech out your newly opened face hatches? (I might be reading a little too much Terrible Minds, and you should too.) As a reviewer, you have to be honest when you don't like a book, because that allows you to be honest when you like a book, and as a writer, you have to use the most compelling language you can come up with, but you are also a human being discussing something very important to another human being.

Part of solving this problem is to give those books the same attention you give to books you like, which is why you almost never seen a bad review on my blog. If reading a book makes me want to peel the first few layers of skin off my fingertips with a vegetable peeler and cartwheel dots of blood down the middle of the street, I'm going to stop reading it. And if I stop reading it, I won't be able to write with that respect. If I've committed to reviewing a book for someone else, I'll pick up my eyes, get through, and do my best to be truthful and respectful at the time. I've had editors decide that I did not strike that right balance and chose not to run those reviews, which is what an editor is supposed to do. The reviews have also been run without additional comment. Sure, at the end of writing those reviews, there is a sense of having scaled a mountain that was also kicking you in the junk while you climbed, but there is also a sense of wishing to have spent your time not getting kicked in the junk.

Towering Achievements of Literature

My brain has been shredded by this book's razor-sharp awesome.

But, in many ways, books I absolutely love are just as difficult to review. Just as it is hard to respect while hating, it is hard to love without gushing. There is a point where the language kind of tips, and you risk readers shifting from “This sounds great” to “Nothing could be this good.” There is a kind of praise that sounds inherently disingenuous or, perhaps, even delusional. You can gush about a book to your friends and because they know you, they can calibrate that gushing to their own tastes, but the person on the other side of the internet won't have the luxury of that calibration. There is always the chance that the readers don't see a seasoned professional offering a prudent but positive opinion on a work of literature, but a crazy guy air drying his crazy pants on the crazy internet.

What distinguishes this challenge from writing about weeping pustules of “language” is that I want to write about these books, I want to celebrate them, I want to make other people read them. It is a beautiful enthusiasm but sometimes it means what is supposed to be a review becomes publicity.

Twice, recently, I've started to review a book only to get to the other side of a first draft and realize there would be no way I could mangle my personal reading experience into a review and wrote essays instead. One of them was this essay on Karl Ove Knaussgaard's absolutely brilliant but at times Revelations-level infuriating My Struggle Volume 2: Man in Love, and the other an essay on White Girls by Hilton Als. But that only works when I have the luxury to not turn in a review. When I've committed to a review I try my best to be overt as to who I am as a reader so readers understand how such a powerful connection was made and to, at least, mention aspects of the book other readers might have a different reaction to.

Meh.
Is there a more horrible and yet more expressive word in our modern lexicon? (I'm sure there's someone cranking out a self-help book about removing “meh” from your life.) There's nothing wrong with the book, per se, I mean, it's fine, it's just, well...there isn't a lot you can say about a book that is “meh.” So, maybe you summarize the plot or the themes, maybe suggest some other works this one might resemble, and then, well, you tell the world the book is “meh.”

In some ways this is analogous to the respect problem of the books that set my spleen on fire with their incendiary awful. Does a 300 word review really demonstrate respect for an act of human creation? Does it show that I have done my due diligence as a reviewer? Does it do anything for the reader of the review? I mean, ultimately, the review should make the reader look away from it, to the book under consideration, but the review is still read and the act of reading it should have value. To often, I feel the review prose at the other end of a meh book tends, itself, to be meh.

What Is a Book Review?
Perhaps one of the most frustrating and perhaps even destructive aspect of our current literary culture is our lack of distinction between a book review and what gets appended to books by casual readers at Amazon and Goodreads. I'm not disparaging those casual reviews, at all, as they do serve their purpose and a reader who knows how to utilize them can extract a lot of useful information from them. But they are different from what we have traditionally called “book reviews.”

Book reviews are not just an expression of taste or opinion, though they do express taste and opinion, and book reviews are not just an assessment of quality, though they do that as well; book reviews are a cultural conversation between writers and readers, a conversation that has the ability to extend itself beyond the book in question to examine other aspects of being a person. They are a vital part of the give and take that is created by a book being written, and they extend that give and take beyond the individual reader with the individual book, to the entire world of readers.

The short opinions and ratings systems of Amazon and Goodreads are a kind of conversation about books, and, though I, personally, don't get a lot of value or information from that kind of conversation, I'm not upset that other readers do. But those comments do not do what book reviews do. They don't help us become better readers. They don't give us insight into the potential meaning of a book. They don't connect that book to the history and future of books. They don't make us think about the world around us. And they certainly don't slow down our judgment machines showing us the time, complexity, and thought that should go into forming an opinion.

Apologies for getting a little ranty here at the end, but we should have more book reviews and they should be in the mainstream media. The literary internet is amazing and powerful, and passionate, thoughtful, and intelligent readers have done much to fill the void in our culture when newspapers and other mainstream media dropped books coverage. (Quick aside: People read newspapers, readers want to know about books, so obviously, the first thing you cut from your newspaper is your books coverage, because obviously if they're reading a newspaper they don't have any interest in reading about things to read.) But the literary internet cannot replace the casual, tangential, part-of-the-habitat interaction with literature that happens in newspapers and magazines, where people reading for the sports scores are at least shown that books count in our culture.

So even though some books are impossible to review (phew, brought it back around) we still need more book reviews in more places for more people. Unless of course, we don't want to run the risk of having a more thoughtful culture.