Reminiscing on the holiday season begins with cleaning out my inbox. From November through January, email upon email arrives with hundreds of reviews, telling us, the consumer, what we absolutely must purchase for our loved ones — as well as the items we can go without. The book world is no exception. As a book lover, dozens of “best books of 2024” lists made their way into my December inbox imploring me to add more to my never-ending to-be-read list. My oversaturated email account, combined with my own foray into book reviews, has me thinking a lot about the genre.
According to scholar Evelina Orteza y Miranda, book reviewing began in Athens around 140 BCE. However, she explains that the first publication dedicated to book reviews was a Parisian journal started in 1665, the Journal des Scavans. The goal of the journal was mainly to summarize academic work, providing an overview of scholarly fields. For years, the practice of book reviewing was limited to accounting new literature — with the idea that readers could decide for themselves whether new works were of interest to them.
It wasn’t until 1802, with the publication of The Edinburgh, that book reviewing began to include criticism. The Edinburgh — a Scottish magazine in print until 1929 — transformed literary reviews. Not only did their critiquing process emphasize selection — creating specific criteria for the books they reviewed — but the magazine also emphasized the reviewer’s opinion, “requiring critical comments.” In the years since, this form of book reviewing has become a means of shaping, understanding, and contextualizing literature.
However, it is an imperfect practice. Book selection criteria has historically been swayed by various biases, perhaps mimicking those of the publishing industry, with marginalized voices frequently being left off the page regardless of literary merit. The modern shift to internet journalism has also engendered a book selection that prioritizes clicks and shares. Some complain that book reviews spoil the organic quality of approaching books blindly — a critique that traces back the origins of reviewing.
These feelings are justified. Critiquing is a loaded practice, one that requires intention and care.
Yet there is an exciting, engrossing quality to contemporary book reviews that keeps me reading. With each review, I find myself eagerly watching literary dialogues unfold, revealing crucial questions and observations about the state of literature as it evolves in real time. As Toni Morrison explained, “If there were better criticism, there would be better books.”
Books are not simply products or stories, but are a means of conversation between an author, a publisher, and an audience. Reviewing is perhaps the most essential genre for people to question and identify the sorts of stories we are searching for, a search that speaks volumes about the world at large.
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