BOOK SHOP'S PROGRESS
is a popular pastime, though there has been less of it in Book Shop itself lately. Perhaps there has been less need. Many of = problems are not peculiar to ep advice to Book Shop Book Shop, and it is scarcely fair to expect it to solve dilemmas which must have beset reviewing since reviewing began. Entertaining reviews are usually either raves or slathers. The cool appraisal of a book by a reviewer whose emotions it has left untouched can be a dull business. Probably every book ever written ‘is capable of arousing strong feelings in some breast; but how do you find the right breast? And how are you to be sure that when you have found it, it will be able to express itself? Do you prefer the reviewer who knows what he’s talking about but can’t talk, or the one who knows much less but has the gift of the gab? And if you stop distributing review copies and ask people instead to share their enthusiasms, won't | the resulting haphazard selection ignore many books which ought to be reviewed? I think that a successful mating of books and reviewers is more likely to result from the present system, as the compiler gets to know her contributors, than from any miraculous new one, I think I hear this happening. Either 'I’m getting soft or the standard of reviewing on Book Shop is rising, though we still suffer too often from the programme’s oldest weakness, a_ restless | search for new voices. New voices there | must be, and many of them are welcome, but must every experiment be inflicted on the long-suffering listeners, even when it turns out a dismal failure? I should like to know that an occasional recording was being discreetly sat on.
i'm glad there has been more interviewing lately, though with the ZBs again weighing in with bulk reviewing Book Shop ought to take more time for trivia, I’m especially glad that although Sarah Campion some time ago repudiated a suggestion that she should take a greater part in proceedings, she has lately been doing so. Such a miscellaneous progtatnme needs a strong personality to hold it together, and, besides, I like listening to’ Sarah Campion. I'm even hopefully buying a _ ball-pen refill to make a fresh start on my book to be entitled My Friend Sarah. Maybe I don’t really know her as well as all that, but radio sometimes gives one these
happy delusions.
R.D.
McE.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19560713.2.47.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 24
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414BOOK SHOP'S PROGRESS New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 24
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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