THE YEAR IN REVIEW - 2005
By Alex Good
January 2, 2006
Things are looking up!
Or at least I think things are starting to look up.
Which is another way of saying that I may be able to spend a bit more
time on this site in the coming year. Of course that may just be wishful thinking, but I'm
hoping.
As for the year that was . . . well, some of the news was
predictable. Whatever else you want to say about Harry Potter, the success of
those books tells you a lot about the changing landscape - event
publishing, franchising, and the ongoing juvenilization of the adult reading
public. I think the statistic that turned my head the most in 2005 (and I don't
know if it was true), was that the latest Harry Potter title sold more copies in
one day than The Da Vinci Code did in a year. That's amazing. Shades of
Hollywood in the 1980s. And look at what happened to that industry.
Despite all of the worried buzz over the way books are being
incorporated into the structure of the Internet as disembodied texts, I didn't
interpret things like GooglePrint or Amazon's "look inside" function
as the beginning of the end. No doubt there are important copyright issues
involved with all of this, but it's hard to see it as an economic threat . . .
yet. Movies and music may be swapped as so many files to be downloaded and then
played back on individual entertainment systems, but books? It's not just that
the book is such a simple, effective technology already. It's the fact that the
book is a technology that has adapted to the human species, and the species to
it. Imagining something better than a book at providing the kind of experience
it does is like imagining having a better friend than a dog.
A lot of what I read in 2005 was quite disappointing. As I had
occasion to note in one of my News commentaries, I think this was the year that
saw the passing of an establishment. So many bad books (Kafka on the
Shore, Specimen
Days, Lunar
Park), and well-executed but mediocre books (Never Let Me
Go, The
March) by big-name authors that I expected more out of. However,
I did think it was a very good year for the Canadian small press. Paul
Glennon and Chris Eaton should have attracted more attention with works
like The Dodecahedron and The
Grammar Architect. It was also nice to see a new Canadian small press, Biblioasis,
start up with a solid set of titles. Good things are happening!
I didn't see very much interesting happening online this year.
For what it's worth, I think the blogs have probably peaked. I look to see the
more established book sites develop into more general magazine-style efforts, or
to re-invent themselves in new directions (like MobyLives
Radio). I would like to see more full-length commentary and reviewing
happening, but for various reasons - not least of which is my suspicion that
there's a lot less actual reading going on out there than all this book
chatter might seem to indicate - I'm not going to hold my breath.
What about this site, now heading into its eighth year? My New Year's resolutions would have to
include: writing more news columns, writing more essays, starting a series of
reviews of classic and popular works, bringing the Puffies back after a two-year
hiatus, and doing the Runaway Jury again. Who knows? Maybe this time the real
G-G jury will pick the best book!
I don't know how much of this I'll be able to swing, but that's
a list of some of what I want to try and achieve. I might come up with some
other ideas as I go along. This site has always been more of a personal homepage
than anything else, and I've always just followed my inclinations. You never
know where such journeys will lead.
Best wishes for a safe and happy New Year,
Alex Good
alex@goodreports.net
