Book pages provide more than shopping advice

Good reviews should let you know if something's worth buying, and why. But they also need to stand on their own - and to entertain

Guardian blogger Claire Armitstead has her say...............................

Last week I blogged about the problem of embargoed books and seem to have got up some people's noses. I focused on one particular book - Benazir Bhutto's, because it was the one I happened to be dealing with - and ran through the process of getting it from manuscript to review, including the decision to cut a few lines to make space in the paper for a small picture of Bhutto's smiling face, because I felt the picture reinforced the drama of the situation surrounding the review.

"I have to say that I found reading this article seriously dispiriting ... " responded Billymills. "Good book reviews have nothing to do with drama, unless they are reviews of dramatic texts. They are, or should be, opportunities to discuss the merits of books *as books* and to give the interested reader some indication of whether or not it is worth their while forking out good money to buy them. Sadly, they are rapidly becoming just another part of the celebrity culture that dominates the rest of 'our' (now there's a laugh) media."

There are several points in here. Firstly, that the purpose of a reviews is "to give the interested reader some indication of whether or not it is worth their while forking out good money to buy them". It's true that one function of review pages is to help readers to know which books, of the 150,000 published each year, they might want to buy. But plenty of newspaper readers don't buy books, and many read books pages specifically so that they can get a sense of what's going on without investing either the money or the time that the book itself would take. So my aim is to give a sense of those books and to place them in a context - social and journalistic and literary - that will, I hope, make people feel they are reading something enjoyable and worthwhile now, in these few minutes, with this review. If I have chosen interesting people to write about interesting books, then sales may follow.

Which leads on to Billymills' second point - "Good books reviews have nothing to do with drama". Well, actually, every book review is part of a set of pages and what is a set of pages but a form of framing? Even a sort of stage? In good books pages, reviews speak to each other and bounce off each other so that the experience of reading the pages is not just the experience of one damn thing after another.

In Saturday's Review, we juxtaposed a page of "international affairs" reviews (about Russia and Guatemala) with one on fashion. There's nothing coincidental about this. My judgment, as editor, was that the juxtaposition might woo readers from one page to the other because of the unexpectedness of the contrast. What's more the two fashion reviews weren't exactly cut from the same cloth: one was an expert analysis of what clothes said about how people lived in the 18th century. The other was a witty appreciation, by Saffron Burrows, of an A-Z of modern fashion mores.

Which brings me to Billymills's third point - that books pages are "rapidly becoming just another part of the celebrity culture". It's true that celebrity played its part in binding the pages together and making them lighter and more playful than they would have been without it. But I don't think that undermines the integrity of the selection, or the seriousness of each individual review.