Monday, December 10, 2007

Book reviewers, ethics and a new detective

The National Book Critics Circle has posted the results from their latest survey of book reviewers about ethics. There's a summary of some of the results on the blog and you can link to the results with comments from 2007 and 1987.

Trying to muddle through the conflict questions was a little tricky for me. Not because I'm an ethically loose kind of person. It's more likely because I've only had about 5 hours sleep and, in this new socially networked, multiple stream of income world, I wonder how hard it is as reviewer and a book editor to identify and shut out those conflicts.

If an editor cannot review books by any of their freelance reviewers, that's strange to me. Sure there are thousands of books being published, so content is not the issue, but coverage (if any of them has a noteworthy, popular or very unique book) is.

And as the actual job of book reviewer disappears and all reviewers are freelancers or writers who do other things as well, how can that last?

Interesting reading and thinking.

New P.I. on the block
Walter Mosley will introduce a new detective, Leonid McGill, in 2009. Mosley has left Little, Brown and is now with Riverhead Books. He has a three-book deal there - two will be entries in the detective series and one is a literary novel.

Easy Rawlins was my first adult love in the mystery genre - I still remember reading the early novels and not being able to get enough of Easy. I will be eager to get into the other series. (BTW, my elementary mystery fix was good old Encyclopedia Brown - who doesn't love a mystery solving nerd).

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