Over the past several years, many essays have bemoaned the loss of book review sections in major newspapers, celebrated the plenitude of book reviews in blogs by every mother’s son and daughter  who can type a few words on a keyboard, and mourned the death of the professional book critic—a writer who has devoted his or her life to writing not novels, poetry, plays, or stories (though the writer might try his or her hand at these from time to time, the writer’s best writing grows out of engagement with another’s writing) but book reviews. I’ve written about the dearth of literary criticism here before, and despite some impassioned pleas for literary blogs, blogs simply lack the depth and breadth of literary criticism. However, over sixty years before our current malaise, George Orwell wrote a canny and humorous essay that captured the anxiety, frenetic pace, the drudgery, and the fleeting sense of excitement that attend the life of a book reviewer. His essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (1946), collected originally in Shooting an Elephant, certainly deserves to be better known in our day of fractious fomenting over the death of the book review and book reviewer.

Orwell observes that the book reviewer is a “man of 35, but looks 50 . . . At present it is half-past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby . . .” Of course, one quick look around today and the book reviewer is just as likely to be a woman as a man—maybe 35, going on 50, but most likely much younger—but the procrastination of the book reviewer and the pressure of meeting deadlines has not changed. In the same paragraph, Orwell portrays the neediness of the Grub Street book reviewer; although he is professionally occupied as a writer, he’s not getting rich from reviewing books. He’s interrupted later in the day by the post, which delivers “an income tax demand printed in red.” Nothing much has changed there, either. It’s very difficult to make any money reviewing books; if I had depended on my reviewer’s salary last year, I’d be so far below the poverty line, I wouldn’t be able to see the line itself. In addition, book reviewing these days is most often a freelance occupation, which means, of course, that book reviewers lack any benefits and they must keep up with their own taxes so as to avoid the taxman at the end of the year. Any one of these elements might be enough to discourage book reviewers, but all of them combined make the profession of book reviewing attractive only to handful of starry-eyed writers who think that someone actually reads the reviews they write and takes those reviews even a little seriously.

All book reviewers look forward to the post—or to the UPS or FedEx or DHL delivery—when a new parcel of books arrives. If the reviewer has been able to pitch a review to a review source—less and less likely these days—then the parcel may contain one of the books he or she has requested. Orwell’s book reviewer takes whatever work comes his way—as is the case with many reviewers even today—and he opens a bulky parcel containing five volumes. He finds “the five volumes to be Palestine at the Crossroads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (this one is 680 pages and weighs four pounds), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down, probably included by mistake. His review—800 words, say—has got to be ‘in’ by midday tomorrow.”

The diverse range of books that the author has received spells some trouble for the reviewer, as does the length of the review. The latter has not much changed. Not many review sources allow reviewers to stretch out and review the book under consideration. The standard book review length for some magazines is 175 words and some are more generous at 250. Most book reviews clock in at 750 to 800 words, though they’re often not omnibus reviews that deal with more than one book. Of course, it’s a pretty common charge from authors and readers that reviewers can’t have read the book under consideration. Orwell’s poor reviewer feels that he must read at least fifty pages of the books of whose subjects he is ignorant so that he can forestall such criticism. The reviewer procrastinates on writing the review; he stares at a blank page of paper until the wee hours of the morning and then “the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action,” and he turns in the review on time. Not much has changed.

No matter the excitement of book reviewing or the chance one has to write about good books in the midst of mostly mediocre books, the reviewing of books too often becomes a fruitless and frustrating enterprise. “The prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating, and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash [one need look only at every Sunday’s New York Times Book Review to wonder how such bad books merit such coverage] but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands of books that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.”

In the end, we write book reviews because we hope to find those books that matter and to announce their publication to the world, or to warn the world how bad a book really is. If only we could review the books that seem to matter—talk about shorter book review sections—then perhaps book reviewing could once again gain the lively reputation it once had. Orwell observes that “the best practice . . . would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews—1,000 is a bare minimum—to the few that seem to matter.” In his characteristic way, Orwell ends his essay with a splendid tongue-in-cheek observation. “The book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.”


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it