Book Reviews vs. Book Criticism
This entry at litblog Collected Miscellany draws an interesting and, I think, quite valid distinction between book reviews, written for newspapers and amazon.com, and book criticism, written for academic or scholarly purposes. Describing the latter, he uses that quintessential grad school word “unpack”.
I’ve been reading Collected Miscellany for some time, and have been remiss in not adding it to my list of links yet. There are a handful of contributors, all of whom write on specific books and other book-related commentary. It’s quite well done.
I find Collected Miscellany a good companion to Conversational Reading, which has a good intro posted today. Conversational Reading is a single-author litblog, recommended to me by Blogenheimer.
And while I’m on the topic of litblogs, I will mention again how much I enjoy Blog of a Bookslut. The short, bantering entries are informative and fun to read.