The Life and Death of the Book Review

I subscribe to the paper version of the Times Literary Supplement and used to also subscribe to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. All pretty decent publications, and I only canceled the latter two to save a little money.

All three are essentially just short book reviews written by experts on the topic, for example, a book on the history of Constantinople written by a Greek history professor. The books reviewed are definitely more “serious” and sometimes a little niche, so you usually won’t see the stuff on Amazon top charts.

In any case I highly recommend it, if only as a way to discover some new books and learn about different topics:

https://www.the-tls.com/ https://www.nybooks.com/ https://www.lrb.co.uk/

In a 16th century French literature course, I read Montaigne in the original—I realized then how much I rely on paragraphs to read prose...

I don't quite see why the author shuns them.

Scanning this 998-word essay, I'm wondering if OP accepted a dare to write at length about the current state of book reviewing without ever mentioning Goodreads. His essay proves that it can be done, but -- wow! -- what an omission.

Yes, the caliber of reader reviews on Goodreads is all over the map. But it is huge, passionate forum for active readers of all stripes. Spend a little time with lists, filters, reading circles, etc. -- and you can semi-reliably get both reviews and recommendations that are well worth the time invested. Most major publishing houses know this, accept it, and have even come to appreciate it.

As a hardcover author in 2017, I found that my publisher's marketing/publicity team was very comfortable with Goodreads' prominence and felt that its review-by-review quirks balanced out over time in a way that ultimately was quite good for promoting wider readership of interesting books.