WSG Newsletter: Book Reviews Online

Issue: May 16, 2001

For the casual reader and the serious student alike, the Web offers many excellent resources for finding book reviews and background information on authors. Whether you’re slotted to lead a book discussion at a book club and need thoughtful material on the author and the book or you’re a more casual reader looking for a quick assessment, you’re sure to find reviews and comments using the resources and strategies outlined in this newsletter.

Where to Begin

The quickest start is to plug author and title into a search engine. Google usually performs well on this kind of search because it has the largest database of indexed web pages and it is able to present the best known pages first. Thus for the search "john le carre" "constant gardener" "book review", Google returns 30 results picked up from magazines, newspapers, bookstores and publishers.

One might try a meta-search engine in order to do a bigger sweep of the Web for reviews. Metor (http://www.metor.com) for this query returned 60 results from Google, Altavista, Fast, Lycos, and Northern Light, ranked by collective relevance.

The Modern Word (http://www.themodernword.com), a site specializing in 20th century writers, recommends Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com) as an “excellent literary search engine”. This is especially so because Northern Light organizes the results into folders – one of them being book reviews, and can pick up articles from its Special Collection, of for-fee but low-cost articles.

A word about search terms: “book review” can be too restrictive a modifier in the search. Sometimes just the word review is better, or nothing at all. Try all three. Also, it’s easy to get author or title wrong. Search more broadly on the author’s name to find a page with the exact title.

Top Down

When looking for genres of literature, periods or countries, a subject directory will be a better starting point. Large subject directories are best for this.

Typically, a subject directory has a category for Literature within which there are sub-categories for Authors and for Reviews. This is true at Yahoo and Open Project Directory. Looksmart puts Books under Lifestyle and has sub-categories for Authors and Theory & Criticism. The Google Directory (http://directory.google.com) is especially recommended because it uses the comments and selection of the editors at the Open Project Directory and ranks the sites according to popularity. The subject classification for Arts > Literature with categories for Periods, World (by country), and Genres is especially well done .

Where to find Reviews

The main sources for reviews are newspapers and magazines, online sites devoted to books, and commentary available through Amazon and the Usenet.

Bookspot (http://www.bookspot.com) provides an excellent overview to the book world on the Web: what to read, where to buy, guides to genres, and background information on books including news and events. Book lovers will spend hours here. The page on Book Reviews lists leading US newspapers – New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post – with book sections; magazines – Atlantic Monthly and others; online sites such as Bookreporter; and guides by genre. The Literary Criticism page recommends specialty sites on literature including the excellent Modern Word.

Bookspot mainly covers the book scene in the United States. A more comprehensive and international directory to book reviews on the Web is provided by AcqWeb. (http://acqweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/acqweb/bookrev.html). This service was created by librarians for librarians but will be of value to all readers. It categorizes sites into over 20 groupings including for-libraries, popular press, scholarly and interdisciplinary, and electronic publications.

Newspapers and Magazines

There are dozens of newspapers and magazines with book reviews. AcqWeb lists many of the best. For more, a directory like ABYZ Newslinks (http://www.abyznewslinks.com/) will list newspaper web sites around the world where you can check individually for book reviews – very handy when looking for the opinion of the writer’s home country.

New York Times Book Review (http://www.nytimes.com/books/) is a must have. It is the only source for reviews of older books. Its archive, which is free to use, has reviews going back to 1980 – a rarity on the Web. The books section has daily reviews and the Sunday Book Review. Readers might also dip into the first chapter from hundreds of books or listen to an audio interview. Researchers can select from over 200 author retrospectives. People who wish to really study a book might participate in the Forum, featuring a new “classic” every month. In May, the moderated discussion is about Jane Jacob’s 1961 city planner eye-opener, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'. Avid readers can stay in touch with what’s new each week with the emailed newsletter.

Globebooks (http://www.globebooks.com/) is the web site for the Globe and Mail’s book section, enriched somewhat for the Web. Reviews are only those for the past 7 days, but there are archives for author interviews and author profiles. The database of authors contains information on 20,000 authors of which 2,500 are Canadian. Access is only by using the search facility. When running a search, use the Advanced: often it is easier to a book title than an author’s name. Not everyone is here. I found Timothy Findley and Patrick White but not John Le Carré. Stay up to date with the weekly newsletter.

Times Literary Supplement (http://www.the-tls.co.uk/) has been the authoritative guide to English-language books for decades. The archives are open only to people subscribing to the print edition. However, the Web site does carry the current week and there is a weekly newsletter to alert readers to new content.

Booksonline, (http://www.booksonline.co.uk/) a Web publication of the Telegraph (UK), makes its archive of reviews and book-related articles back to 1996 free for viewing. The search interface is quite sophisticated – search by author, title, reviewer, keyword, date. Carol Shields reviewed A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale in May 2000.

Atlantic Monthly’s Books and Critics (http://www.theatlantic.com/books/) is another book lover’s grazing ground. The current page is rich with interviews, letters, and reviews. The Atlantic has also been republishing reviews of classics and including them in their online archive of articles from 1995 onwards.

Review Sites

There are a few sites that serve as a central point for finding reviews. One of the best is Complete Review (http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html) - Literary Saloon and Site of Review. They say that they are “a selectively comprehensive, objectively opinionated survey of books old and new”. Staff review the books and collect links to publications on the Web. Byatt’s Biographer’s Tale is here, graded as a B+ and accompanied by a summary of published reviews. Complete Review has other features to amuse its visitors, most notably the top rated, the underrated, and the under appreciated (Patrick White is on the list).

Overbooked.org (http://www.overbooked.org/) is for the “ravenous reader”- mainly of fiction. It is another good starting point to book-related sites. It picks up its recommendations and one-line reviews from Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal..

Canadians might check the Canadian Literature Reviews (http://cdn-lit.ubc.ca/reviews) from the University of British Columbia for articles on Canadian themes. The web site carries pre-publication versions of articles. At time of print the articles are removed from the web site. Table of contents for the print journal can be searched, but the articles are available only through a library or by purchase of back issues.

Amazon.com and its UK sister site carry reviews and invite reader comments. For example, 109 people have reviewed Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin many of them giving it 5 stars – yikes. The comments may not be as informed and cogent as those of a professional reviewer, but they can help in deciding whether to buy a book and might confirm that others thought a book wretched (though this was not the case with the Blind Assassin).

Article Collections

Reviews that are published in magazines may be found through FindArticles or Britannica’s collection.

FindArticles has over 300 magazines with articles dating back to 1996. The Gale Group provides this collection. The results can be quite surprising – such as a review of Le Carré’s Constant Gardener from the British Medical Journal. (The reviewer says that Le Carré’s depiction of the machinations of a pharmaceutical company was not anti-industry.)

Britannica.com is still free and very good. A search on an author may bring up an entry from the encyclopedia, some reviews or articles, and recommended web sites.

Going to the Library

Reviews for current and popular books will be easy to find on the Web. But for the more obscure and certainly for books published earlier than 1995 we may need for-fee online databases such as those developed by the Gale Group. Fortunately many public libraries make some of these accessible over the Web for free to patrons. InfoTrac, a Gale database, has newspapers and periodicals back to 1980, and the Literature Resource Center has information on over 111,000 writers along with plot summaries and critical essays. Check your local library on the Web: use LibDex The Library Index (http://www.libdex.com/) to find it.

Conclusion

Sometimes we can find all we need at a search engine. But, for more background about the author and assessment it is best to check the archives of major review sources such as The New York Times, specialty book sites starting with those listed on AcqWeb, or collections like FindArticles. Many of these book-review sites will also provide continuous enjoyment. Subscribe to the newsletters or check in periodically.

Newsletter by Gwen Harris who can never pass up reading a review.