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September 20, 2007

CJR PANEL PODCAST

For those of you who missed Tuesday's panel at Columbia, the Columbia Journalism Review has just posted a podcast of the event.

The September/October issue of Columbia Journalism Review focuses on books and their connections to newspaper journalism. To further explore the themes in Steve Wasserman’s cover story, “The Case of the Vanishing Book Review,” we hosted a panel discussion on September 19. Five book-world experts—Wasserman, Peter Osnos, Elisabeth Sifton, Carlin Romano, and Mark Sarvas—took the case on and engaged in a lively blend of dialogue and debate that addressed some heady questions: Should book sections be essentially populist? What makes them elitist? Why are they shrinking, and how are reviews faring on the Web? How will books themselves thrive in an increasingly digitized world? And what makes a book review any good in the first place?

Posted at 09:37 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

linda

Thank you! Excellent podcast. It was wonderful hearing intelligent debate about the subject, and listening to other book editors take on Steve Wasserman. Read his article. Very thoughtful, but a little pompous.He loves the sound of his own voice. Reminds me of Camus's nonfiction.

Posted by: linda | September 21, 2007 at 10:37 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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