Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
REID’S
READER ONE YEAR ON
I have been posting the weekly comments that make up Reid’s Reader for exactly one year now.
The first posting was on 29 June 2011.
As I write, the counter [which you can see at the foot of
the blog] has just topped 20,000 hits. We took a three-week break over the 2011
Christmas season, so dividing 20,000 by 49 we get an average weekly hit rate of
408. But this is a little misleading. It took us a couple of initial months to
rise above an average weekly hit rate of about 300, and now the site is usually
enjoying a hit rate of between 500 and 600 weekly. And rising. Much to my own
surprise, some postings have proven more popular than this. So far, the posting
that stirred the greatest interest was the one featuring detailed comment on
Mary Edmond-Paul’s edition of Robin Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Over 900
people accessed it in one week.
Still, I assume that now a minimum of about 500 people
look at this site each week.
What does this mean in terms of actual readers?
I know that a hit can mean no more than a passing squizz
at something. Curiosity will check a site for a matter of moments just to see
what it is like, and then move on. So I’m assuming there’s a core of about 300
serious readers of the site each week, as opposed to momentary tourists.
This is, of course, quite a respectable readership when
compared with the average readership of, say, a newspaper’s books pages. While
tens of thousands of readers might buy a New Zealand newspaper each week,
there’s no guarantee that any more than a fraction of them look at the books
pages (or any other feature section). And there’s no guarantee that even they read all the book reviews on
display. So about 300 serious, and 200 casual, readers per week is pretty good
going, especially when a number of the books featured are fairly highbrow.
Let’s say it’s the same as a crowded lecture theatre – and considerably more
than those who would read a book review in a learned refereed journal.
At least that is what I tell myself.
So I regard myself as editor and chief writer of a
small-circulation magazine.
The purpose of Reid’s
Reader was, and still is, to provide more detailed comment on new books
than will appear in the average newspaper or magazine. (I am aware that NZ Books, Landfall and sometimes the NZ
Listener still provide book reviews of sufficient length to be truly
analytical.) I am unrestrained by an editor. I can burble on for as long as I
wish. I particularly enjoy the freedom to quote at length from new books if it
proves a point. And I never run the author interviews or cut-and-pastes of
publishers’ publicity material which pose as reviews in some publications.
But I do respect readers enough to know that I cannot
burble on forever.
I am still a regular contributor to newspaper and
magazine review sections, and I know there is a place for the brief, pithy
review that gives an impression of a
book without detailed analysis. That is what the press generally provides.
However, I am also aware that the brevity of the average book review in the
press can make for glibness and superficiality. There should be a place for
reviews that provide more detail and more analysis without drifting into the
esoteric critic-speak of the academic publish-or-perish journal. I hope this is
what I am supplying, although naturally there are some new books which do not
strike me as calling for really extensive review.
I do not always burble on.
You might have noticed that well over 50% of the new
books dealt with here are New Zealand books. This is by intention. Reid’s Reader promotes New Zealand
literature, but also accepts that New Zealand readers spend much of their time
with American, British and other English-language material. That makes up the
other 30% of books featured on Reid’s
Reader.
The second self-imposed task of Reid’s Reader is to remind readers that not everything worth
reading is necessarily new. Hence the “Something Old” section. This I usually
find quite fun to write, as I genuinely do have over twenty years worth of
notebooks with comment and quotation from everything I’ve read (including
cuttings of my old reviews).
These I can cannibalise at need.
Most often I try to relate “Something Old” to the general
subject matter of the week’s book reviewed in “Something New”. If, for example,
I give an account of a crime thriller with a sordid setting among street people
and down-and-outs, it gives me the opportunity to consider Jack London’s People of the Abyss, an account of urban
degradation written a century ago. If I consider in “Something New” the letters
of the dyspeptic Evangelical William Colenso, I have fun by considering in
“Something Old” Walter Pater’s Marius the
Epicurean, which represents exactly the sort of religious feeling Colenso
would have hated. Frank Sargeson’s letters lead me to consider Samuel
Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela.
The personal writings of Robin Hyde, when she was under psychiatric care,
connect with Kay Redfield Jamison’s book on the relationship between artistic
creativity and mental illness. And so on and so on.
However, sometimes I am not able to find such ready links
and connections. Sometimes “Something Old” simply says “Here is something worth reading, regardless of how it connects with
anything else.” And sometimes it says “Here
is something that is not worth reading, but it does reveal the popular
attitudes at the times it was written.” That’s the historian in me
speaking. There is fun in seeing what old best-selling trash says about the
tastes of people in 1950 or 1850. [Look
up the reference to “John Buchan” on the index at right.] There is also fun in
taking on and challenging books that have often been considered classics. [Look
up the references to Conrad’s Victory
and Thoreau’s Walden.]
Without doubt, the most difficult part of producing Reid’s Reader is keeping up with my own
self-imposed deadlines. I do actually read the books I review for “Something
New”, you know. (The devil in me points out that the same can’t always be said
of all book reviewers.) Having read them, I then have to produce a full and
coherent analysis. It can be quite an ask every week. “Something Old” is less
of a chore, but then we come to “Something Thoughtful”. I still do sometimes
produce longer essays that ruminate on historical or literary matters, but as
often now I like to take a quick jab at things or quote a poem in full. I hope
readers find this acceptable.
Highpoints of producing Reid’s Reader so far have been when authors of works considered
have responded to what I have written with on-line comments. I was chuffed that
the historian Paul Preston added a largely approving comment to my detailed
consideration of his The Spanish
Holocaust [see index]. Likewise I enjoyed it when Tony Ballantyne mildly
disagreed with my interpretation of a lecture he had given [see “Bards Bound by
Their Time and Pace”.] There was also the interest of an on-line comment made
by a relative of the thwarted genius William James Sidis, as considered in the
book The Prodigy.
However, while the site causes a number of people to push
the “Like” button, I’d be happier if more people left comments. Feedback is
important to me and Reid’s Reader
sometimes aims to provoke debate. I wrote about the British monarchy as I did
last week partly with the aim of putting bees in bonnets.
It remains for me to thank the publishers who entrust me
with their newest wares. I also have to thank my niece Sophia Egan-Reid, who compensates for my ignorance of technical
matters by actually posting on this site the material I write each week. I may
be able to read and write a lot, but when it comes to how cyberspace actually
operates, I come very much into the category of Under-informed Old Fart.
Comments please.
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