Friday Fun: Bookish Conversations We Never Want to Have Again

Anybody who's followed this blog for any length of time knows that I love books, I love reading them, I love reading and writing about them too. However, sometime it's possible to get a little too enamored of our own little petty obsessions. Of course, my obsessions are fine but yours are a bit suspect.

And for those of us with bookish obsessions, some of the not-so-fine parts of our mania is how we keep coming back to the same stupid conversations over and goddamn over again.

As this post so aptly demonstrated, there are definitely some bookish conversations, arguments and debates I don't feel the need to keep revisiting over and over again.

It's a list of 10 and if they aren't quite what I would list as my top 10, the commentary by Rebecca Joines Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal is worth reading. And perhaps continuing to argue about...

Over It: Bookish Conversations We Never Want to Have Again

#6 ARE BLOGGERS KILLING LITERARY CRITICISM?

RJS: This argument might have been interesting a decade ago, but I sincerely doubt it. The tension between the old-guard lit critics who are–let’s be honest–afraid of being made irrelevant, and bloggers who have changed the public conversation about literature (and, I would argue, breathed new life into it) is real, sure. But it’s a total snoozefest, and new posts about it are rarely more than pageview whoring. Having a slow week at the Official Website for Dying Print Publication? Make some bloggers mad!

And bloggers’ responses are almost as bad. Nothing smacks of pandering quite like a blogger writing a post about how bloggers will save us all. A little (or a whole hell of a lot) less conversation, and a little more action, please.

JSO: Totally agree. We’re probably a little biased here, but this also feels like a settled question. I think a more interesting question would be something like: has blogging increased the total attention paid to books? It feels true, but again, this is the business I’ve chosen. There’s probably no way to measure this, but I don’t think that discussing books is a zero-sum game, with X number of minutes people will spend reading, and reading about books.