How could they?” While the Book Review’s “Ten Best Books of the Year” list still moves the “needle” and its “newsletters drive engagement,” according to Bogaards, several booksellers I’ve talked to, like Michelle Malonzo, the buyer at Changing Hands Bookstore in Arizona, noted that the publication has less influence than it once had: “Bookstagramers and BookTok influencers are as much in conversation readers now as The New York Times Book Review.” As Paul Bogaards, the former executive director of publicity and marketing at Knopf Doubleday, put it to me in an e-mail: “None of the old media properties carry the weight they once did. “It’s been quite a while that we’ve been really the only game in town,” she said, adding later: “It feels really important to me for us to keep doing what we’re doing.” But is being the only game in town enough? Some in the book industry think coverage in the Times no longer has the effect that it had in the past, even as it still rates as an outlet where any publicist would be overjoyed to land a review. When I spoke with Paul last fall ahead of the release of a commemorative issue and book that marked the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, she explained that she took the evaporation of book coverage from the newspaper business to be one of the institution’s raisons d’être. If you like Tiger King or Game of Thrones, for example, the Books vertical has plenty of suggestions for the books you ought to buy once you’ve finished bingeing. It publishes reviews by figures such as Bill Gates and Ethan Hawke and offers a slew of recommendations for “What to Read Now,” including lists for those who might want to pick up novels that concord with their Netflix queue.
The Books vertical on the Times website is now rife with interviews from celebrity authors, both via the “By the Book” feature and The Book Review Podcast. The Book Review’s view of its readers is most obvious in the way it has adapted to the social media era. “In my mind there’s an almost platonic notion of what the center is,” explained one of the Review’s editors, Barry Gewen, in an interview from 2018, “and we try to bring the discussion to the center.”
In the Times’ view, this gives its reviews an authority that surpasses what can be found elsewhere. While many literary magazines ask reviewers to weigh in on a book primarily because of the strength of their opinions, the Book Review’s pages often seek to be a retreat from the ideological debates raging among intellectuals and the commentariat. The Book Review’s pursuit of fairness and balance has become one of its signatures over the decades. As its recently departed editor, Pamela Paul, put it in 2018, “The Book Review has a long tradition of being a political Switzerland.” According to an early unsigned letter from its editors, the supplement aimed to serve as “an open forum for the discussion of books from all sane and honest points of view.” That modest ambition remains in place today, even if, in practice, “sane and honest” can often mean avoiding provocative arguments in favor of reviews that are evenhanded and descriptive. The editors cover the book world as if it were any other news beat: They assign reviews that tend to be informative rather than interpretative, telling readers what books are being published, how relevant the new releases are to current affairs, which of them might be worth purchasing, and which authors are on the rise. For such a durable institution, it is striking that The New York Times Book Review has mostly remained devoted to the template for book reviewing it adopted in the early 20th century.
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