‘10 New Books We Recommend This Week’: How Mediocre Writing Saturated the Market

And why we need literary criticism in the digital age

Published in

ILLUMINATION

8 min readAug 8, 2020

Rows upon rows of haphazardly arranged books, with a blue rusted door in the middle — Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

‘If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.’ (Franz Kafka, 1904)

Kafka was barely in his twenties, and 8 years away from writing The Metamorphosis, when he shared the above insight in a letter to a friend. To me, it shows that he already understood what qualifies as a work of art in any field: the ability of the work to shake something loose inside you and reshape you. You are not the same person after your encounter with it.

To this day, I remember the first time I walked into the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and the first time I glimpsed the city of Petra in the Jordanian desert, because I cried openly on both occasions. I didn’t cry when I read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time last year, but I was punch-drunk for days.

This is what happens to your mind when it encounters and recognizes greatness: it rearranges itself. Recognition also happens on the physical level, as your body registers what feels almost like a blow, or at least a healthy slap in the face.

Provided, of course, that you’re open to receiving such a blow. In today’s world of the 24-hour bad news cycle, I can understand that you might simply want the book you pick up to be a distraction — like a good thriller or romance(hello, J.R. Ward) — or a comfort, like re-reading an old book for the twentieth time (oh hi, The Historian). And that’s ok, too.

But when was the last time you read a book that dealt you a blow? And do you ever think about why it happens rarely?

The 10 good books a week conundrum

If the book publishing market were guided by anything close to Kafka’s reading notions, editors would pick out maybe 10 books of fiction altogether to publish each year. And if book critics followed Kafka’s thought process to its natural conclusion, they would lavish praise on maybe half of those, and give a few useful pointers to the rest so that they can refine their writing process.

This, in turn, implies that you and I would feel compelled to read, say, 2 or 3 contemporary books a year. That might also give us a chance to finally catch up with that book, or five, that we bought 2 years ago. Or, I don’t know, delve into War and Peace as we’ve been meaning to forever.

Can you imagine a world where you’re not constantly bombarded with new titles in fiction touted as great reads? Where every book you pick up is not studded with blurbs calling it brilliant, gripping, evocative, un-put-downable; where every third book you hear about is not a masterpiece and a must-read?

As it is, I receive an email every week from The New York Times with a “books update” containing, on average, reviews of 8 new books of fiction, sometimes with a further list of “10 new books we recommend this week” chosen by the editors. That’s about 40 book recommendations per month. The New Yorker feels obliged to “briefly note” 2–3 works of fiction each week that caught their attention. The Washington Post whittles it down to “50 notable books of the year.”

All in all, excluding non-fiction and accounting for my personal interests, I’m looking at give or take 300 books I could read every year because they’re exhilarating, terrific, and a tour de force. Three hundred. Roughly a book a day. And this is just contemporary authors; it doesn’t factor in all the notable books of the 20th century, not to mention the 2,000 years worth of classics that we’re told we should read in our lifetime. That’s a lot of books to take note of.

Are 500 works of fiction every year— which is how many The New York Times recommends — really worth your time and attention? Are even 10 of them going to blow your mind?

The market is saturated with mediocrity

Even if you’re not much of a reader and were just scrolling past these headlines, you would think there’s hundreds of good books coming out every year. And if you’re someone who likes to read but you just don’t find the time or energy to do it, these headlines are probably guilting you into thinking that you need to read more because apparently you’re missing out on so many riveting books.

But how could you ever hope to keep abreast of all these phenomenal books coming out every week, and get your classics in?

The thing is, you can’t, and more importantly, you shouldn’t. Not only do you not have time to read everything out there, but more importantly, you need to leave some space for the joy of making your own discoveries without being told how you’re supposed to think and feel about a text.

There is also the simple truth that the vast majority of books peddled to you on a weekly basis is mediocre at best and merely reflects what the critic George Steiner called “the lunatic economics of the fiction business.” The fiction market is saturated with second-rate books just because

each month must produce its masterpiece and so the presses hound mediocrity into momentary, fake splendor. (G. Steiner, “Language and Silence”)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s hard to see the trees for the dark wood of “no.1 best-sellers” and “literary sensations.” This is also part of the reason why it can be difficult to find our way to mind-bending books that Kafka talks about — there are just too many trivial ones out there clamoring for our attention and being nothing more than distractions.

This is where you would normally need a book critic to step in and help you manage your to-read list. Unfortunately, the frenetic pace of publishing and marketing books has reduced book critics to book reviewers. They simply don’t have adequate time to engage with the ludicrous amount of texts they’re expected to go through every week, so the assessments they produce are by definition superficial.

Do we even need critics?

Reviewers don’t critique texts and invite conversations about them — they summarize the contents of a book for you and highlight its selling points. It’s worth pointing out here that a 12-year-old child can produce a book summary. That’s not what a critic does.

A critical text is not a Yelp review of your local Chinese restaurant, and it’s not a starred rating on Amazon followed by a one-word comment (“Boring”), or the helpful “I’m so happy I bought this book.” A criticism of any work of art, if done properly, is an invitation to the audience to discover and explore it in their own right. It doesn’t engage with the author of the work, but with the work itself.

You may disagree with the critic — which opens up space for a polemic — or you may find that what the critic said gave you a different perspective that you hadn’t considered before. In the case of books, as Steiner says, “the mark of good criticism is that it opens more books than it closes.”

Dr Mehmet Yildiz recently asked here on Medium whether critics are really creative. I can completely understand where he’s coming from.

In the age of self-publishing and market disruption, critics stand for obsolete gatekeepers brandishing their college diplomas and preventing everyone from having equal access to opportunities in art and life. Very often, they are portrayed as failed artists who cannot create anything in their own right, so they turn their assumed authority to the work of others.

That’s because there’s a lot of truth to it. Steiner himself, who was one of the best literary critics of the 20th century, openly admitted that “the critic lives at second-hand … criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius.” He also saw that many critics act as gatekeepers to interpretation who do not tolerate disagreement, as if there was only one way to read and understand a book (or a painting, or a play).

So, no, (book) critics are rarely creative. The really good ones will even tell you that the only genuine book critic is an author responding to another author by creating his own work — think of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a critical response to Homer’s Odyssey. But to think of criticism as an exercise in gate-keeping is to fundamentally misunderstand its role and purpose.

Yes, we need literary critics, but good ones

In my opinion, good literary criticism does the following:

It acts primarily as a teacher who is trying to pass their love and passion for good literature to their students. A good teacher facilitates inquiry and learning and engages us in a discussion. They don’t dictate or censor, and they realize that ultimate authority does not reside with them.
It helps us forge a connection to the text, clearing away political and ideological preconceptions that often come attached to it. It urges us to interact with the text, not with the author, the reviewer, or the discussion forum.
It help us choose which older books to (re-)read, as the existing body of literature is impossibly large for us to wade through. In other words, it encourages us to (re-)discover the classics, and shows us how they are relevant today. There’s a reason Shakespeare is canonical.
It helps us discover contemporary authors whose writing speaks to our time, but also transcends it. Good criticism can sense that an author’s work will likely also speak to future generations.

I already wrote about the constraints that the digital age places on how and what we read, and our modern struggle to properly engage with texts. In light of this, I see the role of the critic as more important than ever, as a kind of guiding light to help us read well and build our own syllabi.

It is the task of literary criticism to help us read as total human beings, by example of precision, fear, and delight. (G. Steiner)

It is most definitely not its task to hurl 10 books a week at us and tell us that they’re all fantastic reads. I’m advocating a more eclectic approach to how we select reading material: don’t let the market dictate and form your taste.

Find out who your favorite authors like to read. Talk to a teacher/professor that you like about their favorite books. Ask your colleagues or boss (if you like and respect them) what the last book was that made an impact on them. Initiate conversations about good literature — don’t just consume what you’re told.