THE YEAR IN REVIEW - 2000
By Alex Good
December 31, 2000
Since goodreports.net was launched in December 1999 (as Alex
Good's Book Page), this New Year's marks my first anniversary. In what I hope to
make an annual feature I want to look back on the year that was both in terms of
the literature it produced and the experience of running this site.
First, the story online.
Overall, I am very happy with the success of goodreports.net. I have
easily beat my year-end goal for hits (20,000 a month) and the numbers are improving every week.
I'm sure that those of you more in tune with the Internet
would consider my traffic small potatoes, but remember: This site is
almost all the work of one person, and has no
corporate or media affiliations. In addition, it does not advertise or run
banners. In time that may change, but for now I can think of very few
solo book sites that can claim the same success.
Exactly why I have chosen this route may not be obvious. The idea that a
commercial presence is somehow mandatory in order to survive on the Net seems to
have been pretty much accepted now as Holy Writ. As a result, the Internet we have today is advertising
incarnate - a medium that is commercial to a degree undreamt of
even by television. Given all that, goodreports.net may be viewed as an experiment
in just how much one person can accomplish on his own. What the results will
be it is still too soon to say. At this point I wouldn't want to hazard a
guess.
Disappointments? I've had a few. By far the biggest were the letters. As any Webmaster will tell
you, the amount of junk e-mail received always outweighs
the good. In the case of goodreports.net I have found this to be
only too true. Adding to this general sense of disappointment was the despair of getting so
many letters from people wanting their books reviewed. As I have tried to point out, there is little I can do to help in this regard. As it is, I think I already do more than most other reviewers. This past
year goodreports.net reviewed a number of small press releases and even
three self-published titles. How many professional reviews do you know of
that made that kind of effort?
My original intention was to save the Letters page for e-mail responding to the site's content, but that may have been naive.
I do get a lot of positive feedback, but very little in the way of criticism.
Since I find it impossible to believe that everyone loves me, I can only assume
that this is because people are shy. There is no reason for feeling this way,
but I don't really expect anything to change in the near future. In any event, I'm content to offer the space
for second opinions
should anyone so desire. I will not be adding a forum or bulletin board
feature. This isn't because I don't like them - I frequently join in forums on
other sites - but rather because I don't have the time to manage one. [Note:
The Letters page was later discontinued.]
Finally, I should say something about the strange fact that what interests people
the most
are the
negative reviews. Apparently being bitchy is the way to
be popular on the Net. I guess this says something about both human
nature and the state of our culture. The Medved brothers made a fortune off of
their insight that people invariably enjoy talking about the movies they hate
rather than the ones they love. If they are right, and you count yourself among
those with a
sweet tooth for rough justice, my Dogs of the
Year for 2000 were Dream
Catcher, The Golden Age,
and How We Got Here: The
70s. (I should also include my Second Opinion "review" of The
Blind Assassin, with the caveat that it was the one book I could not
finish.)
But enough about life online. What about the year in books?
No one person can possibly hope to read more than a small fraction of the
best books that get published in any given year. The pile of books I wanted to
read in 2000 that I haven't had a chance to get to yet is huge. Meanwhile, the new stuff is already on its way.
From what I did read I would have to say it was a bad year for books.
I didn't read any non-fiction that matched what came out in 1997,
and there was little excitement on the fiction front. I liked Philip Roth's The
Human Stain, but considered it the weakest of this second Zuckerman
trilogy. The Elementary
Particles was certainly interesting, but not a great work of fiction.
And Chris Ware's Jimmy
Corrigan was brilliant but obviously unique.
It is hard to generalize, but if I had to complain about something it would be
the lack of complexity in so much of today's fiction. Most of the novels
I read were formulaic and, in their morality, sentimental. The main reason for
this continues to be the influence of the movies, which have pretty much destroyed
literary expression as we know it, possibly for all time. In an essay that I
stand by as probably the most complete expression of where I'm coming from as a
critic ("What Has
Changed") I tried to explain this entirely
pernicious influence and all that it entails.
I will almost certainly have
more to say about this in the coming year. But the fact
is, the influence of film on fiction today is so pervasive there is simply no
point mentioning it. After a
while you get tired of repeating yourself. What passes for creativity these days
is starting to look more and more like just another commercial product. Perhaps
there is something to Marxist literary theory after all. If nothing else, the farce over
Nega Mezlekia's Notes From the Hyena's Belly only served to point out how degraded the idea of
authorship has become. (For my take on the real meaning of that sorry
episode, which, as of this writing, is yet to be fully resolved, see "The Death of
the 'Author'.")
In terms of Canadian writing the news was mixed. The two biggest Canadian
releases of 2000, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Michael
Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, were critically acclaimed bestsellers but thundering
duds. I could not finish
either.
The true mystery is not that such
writing is popular (though I strongly suspect that the percentage of people who
bought either book and actually read it is very, very low), but that these books
continue to find such widespread critical acceptance. In part this is because of the
corporate media synergy that requires many review outlets to basically hype
their own product. In part it has to do with the Canadian tendency to
make establishment figures into sacred cows. But perhaps most of all it is a
comment on the sad state of reviewing in North America. When reading other
reviews I often question whether the reviewer has done more than glance at the
dustjacket of the book in question. Often the book only receives passing
reference before we get on to the good stuff: gossip about the author. In any event, if you're looking for
more tributes to such frankly incompetent writing, that even if it were well done would
still be nothing more than sentimental kitsch, you won't find it here.
On the other hand, there were at least a couple of interesting new Canadian books that
came out of the small press this year that I was able to get excited about. A.
F. Moritz's Rest on the
Flight Into Egypt was an excellent new book of poetry, and Paul
Glennon's How Did You Sleep?
an exciting debut collection of short stories. I was also happy to see
Alistair MacLeod's stories finally collected in a single volume (Island).
In industry news there was much talk this year about e-books and online or electronic
publishing, but no commercial breakthroughs. As I had occasion to point out
several times in my running commentaries on the year's book news (see, for
example, here), the
e-book is still a work in progress. My own sense is that nothing much will come
of it, at least in the near future, since books are already a relatively cheap and portable technology and
only writers at the very top of the A-list can hope to gain the necessary
visibility. The fact that even a brand name author like Stephen King had to spend well over $100,000 (US) to promote
his first solo e-novel (The Plant), and that even then it failed, tells you something about the
economics involved. In the 500-billion-channel universe that is the Internet how
will a new writer get noticed? Our book industry does not encourage good
writing, but it does know how to handle promotion.
Turning an eye to the future, I should say a few words about what's in store
for the year ahead. In the first place, I expect I will be cutting back on the
number of updates quite severely. As much as I enjoy running the site I have to
keep reminding myself that it is only a hobby. Work and family responsibilities
take precedence over what I do here.
In addition, I would like to keep this site going as
primarily a review site. It would be easy to just go off on rants about
the latest happenings in BookWorld, but I think it is important to stay grounded in
what is actually being written and not let myself get sucked in to the industry
mill. While I accept that the manufacture of "buzz" is the most
important aspect of today's book culture, I don't think it needs commenting on.
For those who are interested mainly in celebrity, there are more than enough
options available.
Finally, I'd like to thank you, the browser/reader. I hope you've enjoyed the
past year at goodreports.net as much as I enjoyed bringing it to
you.
Best wishes for a safe and happy New Year,
Alex Good
alex@goodreports.net
