Why critics keep circling back to the same five books
LitHub's weekly roundup reveals more about literary attention spans than literary merit
Why critics keep circling back to the same five books
Why does every literary publication feel compelled to tell us what we "need" to read this week? LitHub's latest roundup promises five essential reviews, but I keep thinking about what gets left out when we organize criticism around urgency.
But there's something almost frantic about the weekly packaging, as if literary attention might evaporate if we don't consume it immediately.
I'm not sure this holds up, but maybe the real story isn't which books made the cut. It's how literary culture has borrowed the breathless pace of news cycles. Wood and Miller aren't writing breaking news. They're doing the slow work of figuring out what a book means.
The roundup mentions Colin Grant reviewing Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's Backtalker, which got me thinking about how criticism functions differently for different kinds of books. A memoir by the scholar who coined "intersectionality" demands a different kind of attention than fiction. Grant isn't just evaluating prose style (though that matters). He's wrestling with ideas that reshape how we see the world.
The way he lets Jim speak differently when white characters aren't around, that's not just a clever narrative trick.
But back to the weekly roundup problem. When everything becomes urgent, nothing feels urgent. The same five critics reviewing the same kinds of books from the same publishers. Meanwhile, smaller presses publish extraordinary work that never makes it into these lists.
Sam Worley's review of Douglas Stuart's John of John probably deserves attention. Stuart wrote Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize and earned that recognition. But I wonder how many readers will actually seek out Worley's review versus just filing it away as something they should read.
Instead of curating criticism we need to read immediately, maybe we should be building criticism that lasts.
Madeline Miller's Circe works this way. You can read it once for the story of a witch finding her power. But there's that moment when Circe realizes she's been thinking about transformation all wrong, it's not about changing others, it's about refusing to be changed by them. That insight hits differently on a second reading.
Maybe the real question isn't which reviews we need to read this week. Maybe it's which books will still matter next year, and whether our criticism is helping us figure that out.
