I love reading old book reviews

This came up before:

I encountered this book in the library, “Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Selected Journalism 1978-1985,” by Anthony Burgess. It’s just great. I think somebody should collect and print the rest of Burgess’s journalism too. (There do seem to be one or two other collections out there but I doubt they have the density of this overflowing volume of 589 pages of small print. I have a feeling they’re leaving out a lot of good stuff.) I’d also gladly buy an edition of the uncollected book reviews of Alfred Kazin or of Anthony Boucher. I’m sure a lot of editing would be required, though, but I think it would be worth it.

It would be fun to spend some months going through old book reviews from the 1950s-1980s and collecting the most interesting parts for a collection. But I suspect that almost nobody but me would be interested in such a thing.

And here:

Awhile ago I picked up a collection of essays by Anthony West, a book called Principles and Persuasions that came out in 1957, was briefly reprinted in 1970, and I expect has been out of print ever since. It’s a wonderful book, one of my favorite collections of literary essays, period. West was a book reviewer for the New Yorker for a long time so there must’ve been material for many more volumes but given the unenthusiastic response to this one collection, I guess it makes sense that no others were printed.

West is thoughtful and reasonable and a fluid writer, with lots of insights. The book includes interesting and original takes on well-trodden authors such as George Orwell, Charles Dickens, T. E. Lawrence, and Graham Greene, along with demolitions of Edwin O’Connor (author of The Last Hurrah) and the now-forgotten Reinhold Niebuhr, and lots more. West employs historical exposition, wit, and political passion where appropriate. I really enjoyed this book and am sad that there’s no more of this stuff by West that’s easily accessible. Reading it also gave me nostalgia for an era in which writers took their time to craft beautiful book reviews—not like now, here I am writing 400 posts per year along with articles, books, teaching, fundraising, etc., we’re just so busy and there’s this sense that few people will read anything we write from beginning to end again, so why bother? Here I am typing this on the computer but for the purpose of literature I wish we could blow up all the computers and return to a time when we had more free hours to read. There’s something particularly appealing about West’s book in that he’s not a famous author or even a famous critic; he’s completely forgotten and I guess wasn’t considered so important even back then.

I was thinking about all this because I just finished reading “Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews: 2010-2022” by D. J. Taylor. I’ve been a fan of Taylor’s critical writing from way back, so I was excited to hear about this new book. It was excellent, but . . . it contained only 29 essays and reviews. It was only 191 pages long, and without many words on each page (but, annoyingly, the pages were thick so the book is kinda heavy).

Why not publish an 800-page book with a couple hundred reviews? That’s what I’d like to read! OK, I get it, nobody’s gonna buy such a book—but, realistically, I can’t imagine that many people bought this short version either.

In the book’s last essay, entitled “Why Review Books,” Taylor writes that he’d been reviewing for 37 years, “a couple of thousand, maybe.” I’d like to read these! OK, not all 2000, I guess, but it must be possible to pull out a few hundred that would be worth reading—more so than the original books. I’d start by reading all his reviews for Private Eye. Too bad that my taste is not generally shared, so I’m stuck just with these 29 articles. It’s just so frustrating . . . these 2000 reviews are out there, but we don’t get to see them.