Comments on: Book Reviews: Are They Necessary?

By: Emma

Emma — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:59:59 +0000

I would like to add a fourth possible purpose of book reviews: to liberate the pseudo-intelligensia from reading books outside of their field. I can deliver all sorts of cocktail party worthy paragraphs on books I have never read, accompanied by estimations of their relative merits and relations to other books I probably have not read. The TLS and I will confidently answer any questions about Parade’s End, Pascal’s arguments on epistemic normativity, and the Second Crusade.

Writing book reviews may be time consuming and frustrating, but in doing so you are helping to save your overly specialized public from an early stagnation.

By: Indran Amirtthanayagam

Indran Amirtthanayagam — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:28:32 +0000

Elif, you are a wonderful and elegant humorist. I love this piece and look forward to reading more about the comedy traffic school and other misadventures. I am also intrigued by your comments on poets and their typographic devices. I write a blog where I post poems in English, French and Spanish, the three languages in which I write the usually m-dashless poems. Do take a look and I would like to link your blog to my site with your permission.

take care

Indran

http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com

By: Elif

Elif — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:54:33 +0000

Thank you, Dr. Golburt. While I was Googling "Rearranging the Furniture" to find the link to my Shklovsky review, I also found a mention of the review by a reader in, I think, Seattle, who finds comfort in Shklovsky because of her obsession with rearranging her furniture.

This actually really made me want to move a bookcase. Instead, however, I am going to go cook an imam bayıldı (in honor of the baby Jesus). The recipe is from Almost Turkish Recipes, for which I feel a great affinity ever since I made another of the olive-oil recipes and it came out really well, at which point I started poking around the site, and discovered not only an enormously entertaining and quite Shklovskian piece on the refunctionalization of lentils, inspired by Turkish propaganda legend "Auntie Lentil" (Mercimek Teyze, pictured here), but also a profile of the author, revealing her to be a US-based student of literature, whose favorite books include A Rebours! She is a decadent! No wonder she is a good cook.

By: luba

luba — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 07:28:49 +0000

cheer up, Elif! I actually only read book reviews for things I’ve read (usually they are yours; that gives you an idea of the extent my experience with book reviews), and I actually enjoy them a lot: they rearrange the furniture in my mind (this would be an excellent point to introduce a link to your Shklovsky review).