James Frey has, of course, already confessed that he didn’t really serve that three-month stint in the pokey that he wrote about in A Million Little Pieces. Given that My Friend Leonard starts with Frey in stir, his latest admission is a bit anticlimactic.

I wonder if Kaavya Viswanathan will now confess that she was planning to plagiarize something in her now-canceled second book?

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Yesterday I wrote three book reviews: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey; Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan; and Soccer against the Enemy, by Simon Kuper. Anyone who writes for publication knows that the challenge isn’t writing something that’s long enough - it’s writing something that’s short enough. Because we want to review a lot of books in the print Booklist, reviews are, with some exceptions, only 175 words long. When I’m, as they say, “feeling it,” I write short, putting in only what’s necessary to the review. On off days, I put in too much and agonize over what to take out. In The Thinking Fan’s Guide, for example, I wanted to note that most essays aren’t written by natives of the countries under discussion - and point out that half the contributors have written for Granta, where one of the editors is an editor. But there were more important things to say. For purposes of illustration, this blog entry is, you guessed it, 175 words long.

Recently I’ve written about not loving a book everyone else seems to love, a mostly good anthology with a few clanks, and deciding not to star a review by a favorite author. I sound like a lot of fun, don’t I?

Being a book reviewer has definitely made me a more critical reader, but I’m certain that this would happen with a high level of exposure to anything. I love cheese with an unhealthy passion - one of these days I know I’ll wake up to hear my arteries cracking like winter ice - but if tasting cheese became my job, I would no doubt soon become aware of hitherto-unnoticed off notes in my beloved Camembert, Manchego, and Roquefort.

I tend to think that, with certain exceptions, this heightened sensitivity is an essential job skill. If everyone at Booklist were gee-golly instead of a tiny bit jaded, our readers wouldn’t be able to see the must-reads for all the hey-this-guy-tried-really-hard-let’s-give-his-book-a-chances.

Once in a while, though, I do pick up a book and just get hooked, start to finish. Monday night I finished reading Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan (Harcourt, “An Otto Penzler Book”), and damned if it wasn’t a no-doubter. I kept thinking, though, that I was sure I’d read him before - and why didn’t I remember that he was this good?

Wrong Klavan. Thanks to Booklist Online, I was able to remind myself that I have in fact reviewed Laurence Klavan, The Cutting Room. (I liked it just fine.) Are they brothers? www.andrewklavan.com says yes.

At any rate, Andrew Klavan (who wrote True Crime) made me very happy indeed. Those of us who love crime novels are probably in some sense always questing after the thrill we found in the books (by guys named Hammett, Chandler, etc.) that got us started. But because so many writers have been working that beat for so long - lonely, hard-drinking private eyes haunted by good-hearted whores, making long nighttime drives through the pounding rain to abandoned houses where nothing good is bound to happen - that a lot of those elements have become cliche.

I know the “addict” metaphor gets pretty tired, but I really do think it often feels as if I’m chasing after the original rush but the drugs are weaker and at the same time my tolerance is growing. And then, once in a while, someone writes a book that takes all the old elements and puts them together in a way that is fresh and thought-provoking, sad and funny, and gripping as hell. In short, timeless. It’s like getting that first taste all over again….

Deadline tomorrow. Reviews to write.

I meant to post yesterday, but somebody had a case of the Mondays, and that somebody was me. I started this but didn’t finish it:

I rarely read other reviews of books I’ve reviewed. (This is one of Keir Graff’s Rules of Reviewing^TM, soon to be immortalized on a sticky note somewhere in my office.) Just as I’ve said that I never read the publicity material before I start reading the book - I don’t want some PR flack to frame how I see the work, or, worse, to have one of their cheerful phrases creep into my review - reading other reviews poses its own problems.

Because we review in advance of the book’s publication, there are only a few places, easily avoided - Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal - where I might stumble across a published review before I write mine. But even after my review has been filed and published, I still don’t like to read the other reviews, and here’s why:

I receive an e-mail newsletter from Hard Case Crime, an imprint whose books I often review. Scanning the latest installment for news of forthcoming titles, I noticed that the publisher, Charles Ardai, was touting the great reviews he’d gotten for Bust, by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr.

“A full-tilt, rocking homage to noir novels of the 1950s…smart, trashy fun!” raved Publishers Weekly in a starred review.

“Fasten your seat belts….If Quentin Tarantino is looking for another movie project, this novel…would be the perfect candidate!” enthused Library Journal, which apparently hopes to cut off a patch of Kirkus’s turf as movie-development mavens, also in a starred review.

“Terse, sometimes brutal, often funny…vividly fresh…reads seamlessly-and mercilessly!” exclaimed Entertainment Weekly.

Even the Rocky Mountain News called Bruen and Starr, amazingly, “Two of the century’s best thriller writers!” and gave the book an A. (What, no A-plus-plus?)

And, finally:

“Good fun…only a diversion…isn’t quite equal to the sum of its talent,” mused a noncommittal Booklist.

You can read my full review here. (If you aren’t a subscriber to Booklist Online, sign up for a free trial now!) I thought the book was okay, probably not as good as the authors’ noncollaborative books, and certainly not as good as the usually terrific originals from Hard Case Crime.

(By the way, none of the reviews excerpted above used exclamation points. I just think blurbs should have exclamation points!)

I recently mused ad nauseam about how hard it can be to decide how to judge a book, even a book I liked. Reading other reviews adds a completely unnecessary complication, making me wonder: if everybody else liked it, and I didn’t, did I miss something?

And that’s a dead end. Because even if I’m reading the reviews as a post-mortem, they still could influence the way I approach the next review I write. And as soon as I start worrying about whether my review will be the same as everyone else’s, I’m not telling you what I think, I’m engaging in a complicated exercise where I’m balancing my own opinions with my need to have the “correct” opinion, which is as bad as trying to tell you what I think you want to hear. It’s dishonest, and it means my review is no longer providing a service to you.

When I talk about wanting to get it “right,” I don’t mean that I want to make sure I’m saying the same thing as everyone else. By “right” I want to be fair and to provide a well-reasoned argument for my point of view. Trying to anticipate readers’ points of view is bad enough. If I try to anticipate other reviewers’ points of view, I may be trying to anticipate the points of view of people who themselves are trying to anticipate other points of view….

There’s a phenomenon known in the music biz as feedback. A microphone, properly placed, will amplify through loudspeakers the voice of the person speaking into it. If the microphone is placed in front of the speakers, it not only amplifies the voice, it amplifies everything that’s coming out of the speakers, which includes the original voice, other voices, the drummer’s cowbell - which go into the microphone and out the speakers again and again and again, resulting in that horrible screech that makes your eyeballs rattle and the world go quiet for a moment because you just went a little bit deaf.

You get the idea.

Reviewers are just as subjective as readers who don’t review. We all have our own likes and dislikes, preconceptions and pet peeves, insights and indefensible positions. Like all readers, our opinions can be influenced by our egos. But because our opinions do go into the public record, I think that many of us do fall into the trap of wanting to get it “right” - to be in the majority - and that’s “wrong.”

(Okay, enough with the “emphasis quotes.”)

Give any one book to any three people and you’re likely to come up with four different opinions, which is why I always get suspicious of tidal waves in media opinion. I start thinking that the reviewers are reading the other reviewers. And that’s why I don’t.

I read book reviews all the time, of course, and enjoy doing so. Just not when they’re books I’ve reviewed.

Final anecdote: My good friend Frank Sennett reviewed a little sleeper called The Da Vinci Code for Booklist. He gave it a generally positive review but he didn’t star it. Someone asked me recently, obviously thinking of the fact that the book has become such a phenomenon that it’s the number-one cause of global deforestation, “Are you guys bummed that you didn’t star The Da Vinci Code?”

Speaking for Frank, I say of course not. We’re not trying to predict popularity. We might try to anticipate demand, but those are different tasks. We are trying to identify the works that we feel are exceptional, but exceptional quality and mass appeal rarely go hand in hand.

We’re doing our best to tell you what we really think about the books we read in the hopes that you can make an informed decision about whether to buy or not to buy, to read or not to read. We’re assuming that you don’t want to read a book because everyone else is reading it but because there’s something unique about the book that speaks to something unique in you, giving you a unique relationship with it.

And, if we didn’t think there was anything all that unique about the book, we want you to know that, too.

It occurs to me that I’ve strayed into the royal “we.” I’ve said before that I only speak for myself, and that everything in “Likely Stories” represents only my particular take on things. Writing so earnestly in first-person, though, makes me feel as though I’m presenting myself as some paragon of book-reviewing virtue.

I’m not. I suspect I’m just as susceptible as anyone else to wanting to have the “right” opinion. That’s why I don’t read other people’s reviews.

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It’s Friday, so I’m going to let another writer do the talking. Er, writing. This riff from John Lanchester, in his essay about Brazil from the forthcoming The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (see yesterday’s post), starts with a mention of the captain of Brazil’s 1982 World Cup team, “the chainsmoking doctor Socrates”:

There was something so cool about his being called Socrates, too - all part of the strange romance of Brazilian names, most of which, thanks to the complexity and length of people’s full monikers, and a deep love of familiar forms of address, tend to be nick-names. And then there are the suffixes to consider. The winning coach from 2002, Philão Scolari, has the “ão” suffix meaning “big”, thus Philão is sometimes translated as “Big Phil”. The “inho” suffix means “small”. As Alex Bellos points out in his brilliant book Futebol, the current Ronaldo was once himself known as Ronaldinho, because there was already another Ronaldo in the side, as well as Ronaldão. When the current Ronaldinho came along, this could have meant that Brazil were fielding Ronaldão, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Ronaldinhozinho: big Ronald, normal-sized Ronald, small Ronald, and even smaller Ronald. Instead, the former Ronaldo dropped out, the new Ronaldo became Ronaldinho Gaúcho (after his place of origin), and the former Ronaldinho was promoted to Ronaldo, a title he still holds. Perhaps this is no odder than the time England had one player called Trever Steven and two players called Gary Stevens (prompting the immortal chant, to the tune of “Guantanamera”: “Two Gary Stevens - there’s only two Gary Stevens…”). 

This still makes me laugh.

And, oh yeah, I’m still reviewing a book: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (Harper Perennial). If it seems like it’s taking me a long time to get through it - I first wrote about it here - you’re right.

The book isn’t a doorstop - the galley pages aren’t numbered, so I don’t know its exact size - but nonfiction is slower going than fiction. Also, with 32 essays by 32 authors, it’s hard to settle in for a marathon read. It’s like trying to charge through a book of short stories - it’s hard to find a rhythm, and I find myself wanting to stop and think after each one.

(Do I really read every page of every book I review? How can I get the books reviewed if I read this slowly? Those are questions for another day.)

I am enjoying this book. Many of the essays are thought-provoking, enjoyable digressions on the links between soccer and culture, politics, and personal life. Standouts include essays by Henning Mankell (Angola), John Lanchester (Brazil), Nick Hornby (England), Aleksandar Hemon (France), Tim Parks (Italy), Jim Frederick (Japan), Sukhdev Sandhu (Saudi Arabia), Robert Coover (Spain) - but several others are quite good, too.

Many of them ask questions, whether implicitly or explicitly, that apply to other sports as well. What does it mean to tie your own happiness to the performance of an athlete? What does it mean identify yourself with a team, a city, region, a country? Do athletic contests serve as proxy battles or do they wind us up for the real thing? A recurring theme in many of the essays is the role of the national team in nations who are questioning their own identity in the face of increased immigration.

Unfortunately, some of the essays go too far in this direction and seem barely to belong in a book about the World Cup. They may be fine essays individually (or not, such as Jorge Castaneda’s dry piece on Mexico), but most people who pick up this book will be wanting discussion of the game to be central to each essay, not tangential. A few almost seem to have had references to soccer inserted in order to justify their inclusion here. Starting with Castaneda, Mexico’s former foreign minister, there’s a string of essays like these: Isabel Hilton on Paraguay, James Surowiecki on Poland, William Finnegan on Portugal (which is more about surfing than soccer), Geoff Dyer on Serbia and Montenegro.

(Note to the publisher: this velo-bound galley refuses to lie flat, which drives me crazy when I’m trying to write about it.)

But then Sukhdev Sandhu writes about a fatwa forbidding soccer “except when played as training for Jihad” and, once again we have a brilliant example of how we can learn something vital about a society through its attitude toward sport.

I’ll probably finish this book tonight, which is good, because I have two more to review by next week.

Okay, here it is, my mission statement:

In my blog, “Likely Stories,” I will candidly discuss the craft of book reviewing, chronicling my reading habits, evaluation criteria, strengths, and shortcomings. I want to show both the work that goes into a book review and the challenge of balancing objectivity and personal taste. As I work through my thoughts about the books I’m reading, I will inevitably be reviewing some of them in public, which of course invites readers to opine as to whether I’ve “gotten it right.” Right may be subjective, but that’s another exciting topic to explore. I also plan to write about books and reading in general, looking always for interesting connections between similar books and similar authors. Occasionally, I’ll link to the literary news of the day and offer my commentary. I’ll try to do all this in an entertaining manner - I’ll rely on my readers to let me know if I’m not succeeding. 

No doubt I’ll be tweaking it, but I think that gives you a good idea of what to expect from me.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go engage in some team-building exercises. I’m looking forward to the “trust falls.”

Yesterday I had a lot of fun writing a fake mission statement, but today it’s time to get serious and write a real one. Before putting it in prose, I’ll just make a list. In “Likely Stories,” I plan to:

1. Write about the job of book reviewing with honesty and candor, providing a glimpse into how things work at Booklist and in the mind of at least one reviewer.
2. Discuss books and reading in general, looking often for interesting connections between books and authors.
3. Opine, occasionally, about literary news. And gossip, if the gossip is newsworthy.
4. Digress occasionally into whatever I feel like writing about.
5. Help the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.
6. Broker world peace by the year 2007.

All right, all right, I’m just kidding about #5. Like that would ever happen.

One reader asked yesterday whether this is a personal blog or whether she would see other Booklist reviewers blogging, too. The answer is yes. “Likely Stories” is my personal blog (note the “By Keir Graff” at the top of the page) in that I am the only author. It’s also personal in that, while I am writing about my experience as a reviewer and editor, anything I say here is my opinion only, and not that of Booklist, Booklist Online, or the American Library Association.

(No, there’s not a lawyer standing behind me. Why do you ask?)

But we do plan to add more blogs in the future, hopefully one for each section: Adult Books, Books for Youth, Media, and Reference. Whether those are single-author or group blogs depends on several factors - the most important of which is finding staffers who have the time and energy to write them. Bear in mind that I am the sole dedicated employee of Booklist Online at the moment. BOL draws its content from the magazine Booklist, which publishes 22 issues each year. Booklist editors worked very, very hard before the introduction of BOL and now, if possible, they work even harder. I have time budgeted in my schedule to write a blog but they do not.

So while we really want them to contribute even more to Booklist Online, we don’t want to work them into an early grave, because we like them. We really, really like them. Without them there would be no BOL. No Booklist reviews, no BOL.

But we’ll get it sorted out. Just give us a little time. There will be other exciting new stuff coming first, like the long-awaited Booklist Book Club.

Okay, I’m going to mull over my list for a while and then finalize my mission statement tomorrow. But first I have to put in a call to Condoleeza Rice.

In an earlier post (“What I Think I’m Doing”), I wrote about the challenges of blogging about book reviewing (damn it, I promised myself I’d never use the word blog as a verb!), but I never got around to defining more precisely what I plan to do with “Likely Stories.”

And then last night it hit me: I need a mission statement.

Now, I know that some readers will groan, lumping the concept of crafting a mission statement in with a lot of annoying corporate-world exercises like “team-building,” “self-evaluation,” and “sabotaging a colleague’s career in order to get ahead.” I, too, am wary of the corporate-think that has colonized the world at large. Even grade-schoolers and grandparents seem to have become familiar with such concepts as “protecting the brand,” “pay-for-play,” and “merchandising-tie-ins.”

But even in the tweedy (some might say threadbare) not-for-profit world, we shouldn’t hesitate to adapt the techniques of commerce when they can help promote the arts. After all, if I’m hoping to promote reading by making book reviewing more transparent, it would be very useful for readers to have a short statement letting them know what to expect - and, indirectly, what not to expect - from this blog.

And so, after careful pondering and strong black coffee, I present this draft of the mission statement for “Likely Stories”:

“‘Likely Stories,’ the official blog of Booklist Online, vows to fight evil and injustice, to protect the innocent and shelter the weak, and to at all times uphold the highest standards of honor, valor, and chivalry. ‘Likely Stories’ will neither be cowed by danger, nor daunted by threat of personal discomfort, in carrying out its mission. Evildoers will be hunted down and prosecuted without regard to rank or musculature. ‘Likely Stories’ will not rest until it has secured world peace; once world peace has been secured, it still will not rest, understanding that world peace can only be protected by eternal vigilance and the self-denial of the need for regular snacks.”

I know that seems a little, well, “big.” And I’m considering cutting the line about world peace, which is kind of cliche. But why have a mission statement if you don’t have a sense of mission? It wouldn’t make any sense to say:

“Likely Stories vows to do an okay job.”

Maybe I don’t need a mission statement, but a motto: “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.”

I’d use that, but I need something original, not from The Simpsons - I don’t want to end up like Kaavya Viswanathan.

Let me work on a second draft and get back to you tomorrow.

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