Status Updates From Faint Praise: The Plight of...

...reviewers, whether they misread, read without adequate background knowledge, or fail to read, end up basing their judgments and interpretations on misperceptions.

By focusing so largely on the big houses, the leading books, the familiar, editors forfeit their chance to discover the new, to expand not only readers' awareness but the cultural mainstream itself.

Does [the reviewer] seek out the best books, the most important ones, the most influential? ... Does he choose the excellent novel that may sell 3,000 copies or the poorly written thriller that will sell 1,000,000? Should the book page educate taste or cater to it?

What appear to be straightforward problems -- overpraise, undernotice, bias -- turn out to be complex. Reviewers have the byline, and they have generally taken much of the blame. But this is a large and disorderly field. Editors and publishers, authors and readers also play their roles. Literary traditions, cultural attitudes, the demands of both the marketplace and the genre play theirs.