In Common Reader-land, here on the South Coast of England, the weather has been beautiful over the last few days. Cold, but with the absence of wind, the low temperatures have not been noticed.
The cold winds of recession continue to blow in every corner of the economy however, and with the Daily Telegraph making its literary editor redundant just before Christmas, Robert McCrum used his Observer column to lament the decline of newspaper book reviewing:
. . . blogs . . . have begun to supplant old-style book reviewing . . . the book world is in full-blown transition. Blogs are rampant; Google is digitising every text going; e-readers are transforming the experience of reading.
McCrum goes on to list the demise of the literary lunch, those lengthy sessions in which professional reviewers could use their expense accounts to entertain authors and other literary figures (hopefully gaining a considerable amount of insight into the author's approach to writing along the way).
But perhaps most significantly, publishers are instructing their editors not to acquire new books:
Günter Grass and Philip Roth, both with this publisher, can be expected to write at will. But for any new writer, or worse, a novelist in mid-career, these are the times that try men's souls
And what does McCrum see as the answer to all this recessionary news? Well, even I (in a sort of generic way) get a mention here:
I'm not sure I share McCrum's optimism about that! I feel that people like me and other book addicts are a dwindling minority. A new Smith's opened in my town last month and its somewhat depressing to go in to the book department and find that there is not a single book in the store which interests me. The British reading public (as McCrum puts it) seems unlikely to improve his or her diet of TV spin-offs cookery books and celebrity biographies. I would be delighted to see its shelves stocked with books from my favourite independent publishers such as, Pushkin Press, Serpent's Tail, Dedalus Books, CB Editions, Icon Books, Toby Press - but somehow I don't think this is going to happen.
The encouraging thing about this is that book-lovers can feed their literary tastes by using the Internet. It presents a vibrant new market-place which barely existed a dozen years ago. And in some small way, I and other book-bloggers are part of that market-place. We get sent books for review, our reviews are linked to by publishers and other readers, and we receive invitations to provide material for online literary magazine. So the Common Reader is perhaps far more empowered than he or she used to be in the days when newspaper reviewers were the only source of information about new books and when expense account lunches were how authors explained what they were doing.
