I like books. I like writing them. I like reading them. I like reviewing them.
That puts me in strange company. Each year, a record number of books get published, something on the order of four or five million books. Most of them get a handful of readers. A lucky few get read by thousands.
From a YouGov poll:
Besides the 40% of Americans who didn’t read any books in 2025, another 27% read one to four books. And 13% read five to nine books. That leaves 19% of Americans who read 10 or more books, including 9% who read 10 to 19 books, 6% who read 20 to 49 books, and 4% who say they read 50 or more books.
I’m not going to wade into the “death of literacy” discourse in this post. What’s important to me is that a couple million writers still think it’s important to publish, a couple thousand readers agree, and that both parties deserve to be honored with smart book review sections in respectable publications.
Some media barons disagree. Jeff Bezos, a man who sold books so that he could deliver toilet paper to your door within 24 hours so that he could send Katy Perry to space (and bring her back, for reasons that remain unclear), decided to kill the Washington Post’s book review section. The reason is as simple as that Ray Bradbury book. Fascists hate literacy. Books contain too many inconvenient facts, and weird urges. They are the product of writers with idiosyncratic inquiries and libertine streaks. Books can give people ideas. Ultimately, they’re bad for the vertically-integrated, multi-national, oligopolistic corporate bottom line.
Fortunately, other publications have taken this as a challenge (and an opportunity). Washington Monthly is beefing up its review section, and the podcast Drafting the Past is debuting a new book review website this fall.
I pride myself on maintaining a lively clipbook of book reviews. I don’t turn down book review requests from academic journals (or haven’t yet). Even though they don’t pay, I spent a chunk of last summer writing for a few. But I’ve mostly enjoyed writing for public-facing magazines like In These Times and Jacobin. Once or twice, I’ve had the sweet experience of meeting a fellow scholar at a conference or some-such and received a hearty thank you for exposing their book to a wider audience. Here’s the thing: a review in an academic journal probably gets half a dozen librarians to order a copy of the book. In the interest of transparency, most authors get between seven and nine dollars a copy in royalties, so that review equals a payday equivalent to two cases of beer or a pretty nice bottle of wine. A review in Jacobin probably doesn’t sell more copies, but an author can reasonably hope that at least six people (besides the reviewer) have now definitely read their book! This is more exciting for an author after he or she have made peace with the fact that their book is not going to be one of those magical unicorns that goes into 27 printings before being adapted as an HBO miniseries.
I don’t know how much a review in the New York Times is worth, but I sure tried to find out. Back when I was hustling as a freelancer, and thought that I’d built up an impressive enough clipbook of book reviews (and even op-eds for the Times and Post!) I obsequiously pitched and pursued Pamela Paul (who then ran the Book Review page). In my naivety, I actually pitched a review of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (of which I’d managed to score an advance reader copy). Paul responded. The Book Review rarely accepted pitches, she told me, and anyway, someone else was assigned to review Graeber, but she would circulate my CV and inquiry to her assignment editors. That was in April 2018. We maintained a correspondence for a while, almost entirely me doing the typical “I just want to write again to express my strong desire to write for the NYT Book Review” inbox tickle.
Pamela Paul, of course, got promoted from the Book Review to the editorial page. She mostly produced banal pieces about the decline of western civilization and occasionally shocking Nazi-adjacent moral panic articles about made-up transgender controversies. She got pushed out, a rarity for the Opinion page.
The Times never published a review of Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. The American Prospect published mine, under the headline “Take This Bullshit Job and Pretend to Love It” (Harold Meyerson was not thrilled with the potty language, bet relented, given the book’s title). Graeber tweeted it out. He called it “thoughtful,” which is probably the highest praise a book review can deserve.