Last year there were more than 275,000 new books published in the United States. That got Virginia Quarterly Review’s Jacob Silverman thinking: does every book deserve a review? His answer, in short, is a resounding no, which begs a better question: how does a reviewer find the books best suited to her tastes and critical talents?

The challenge for book-review outlets is to sort through the mass of unsolicited books that arrives every day, the e-mails from authors and PR reps, and the various other articles and notifications announcing the publication of new and interesting titles. Of course, the large publishing houses have an advantage in getting their books into the hands of reviewers and assigning editors, but even they struggle to get their authors the attention they very likely deserve.  With that in mind, what is the best way to connect editors and writers with the books that interest them?

And that conversation begs a better question still: who do you trust in the vast but receding world of book reviews? What publications? What critics?

“Most writers put a lot of time, heart, passion, and effort into their books,” writes Silverman. “Editors and critics should do the same when considering what and how they review.”

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review 

No matter how great a book, film, or album is, there’s always someone on Amazon.com who’s willing to give it a bad review. The Cynical-C Blog has compiled some of the best one-star reviews into a section they call “You Can’t Please Everyone.”

Here are a few highlights:

Citizen Kane:
I saw this movie and just about puked in my lap because it was so terrible! Go see the Da Vinci Code instead. Tom Hanks is ten times the actor Orson “Fatty McFat” Welles ever was!

Wizard of Oz:
the wort movie ive ever seen .I mean they clorized once color tv came out and there special effects are lame ,the costumes are ugly the props are ugly so never buy this film!!!!

1984:
first of all its NOTHING like the future is probly going to turn out. second of all every one says the aurthor george orwell is so trippy and wierd but i think he’s just trying to cover up for the fact that HE CAN’T WRITE. please george do us all a faver and stop writing books.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl:
It was really really boring. Its about some girl and her life- who cares!?! It is a total girly-girl book. Too dull to even care. I couldnt even pay attention to what happened to her, why it was so awful. Oh Well, NEXT…

The Odyssey:
This book sucks. I dont care if Homer was blind or not this book is like 900 pages too long. I could tell this story in about 10 pages. Homer taking all long to say stupid stuff.

Spinal Tap:
People, whatever you do, don’t buy this trash! Just wait until Limp Bizkit (the greatest band ever!) makes a documentary on their wild and crazy and cool antics! It’s sure to put this to shame!

Abby Road:
This is more music for druggies. The Beatles should be ashamed to put out this album. I saw Paul Mcartney live last year and he was better than this album, and the other Beatles weren’t even there. But the stage show was boring, there where no pyrotecnics or girls. When I saw Motley Crew during there Dr. Feelgood tour they at least had Fireballs and dancing girls. Plus Mick Mars destroys George Harryson on guitar!

Source: Cynical-C Blog 

Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird aims squarely at the pleasure center of the bookish indie set. His several acclaimed albums of postmodern chamber pop highlight his nimble playing and the warm electronics of his frequent collaborator, the drummer and producer Martin Dosh. 

Only a team as visionary as Bird and Dosh would strive to fix what isn’t broken and transcend this winning formula, as they have with Noble Beast, where suitelike song structures, instrumental interludes, and audacious lyrical constructions build and soar but never topple into excess.

“Masterswarm” begins with a minor-key acoustic prelude to a joyously orchestrated tango of violin flourishes and handclaps. Bird’s whistling and tremolo guitar splice the mood of Strictly Ballroom with that of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The arrangement employs addition, then subtraction, as the song’s instrumentation is gradually pared away until only the crushed bits of Dosh’s rhythm loop remain.

Indeed, Noble Beast’s most successful moments are its most percussive and experimental, evenly blending Bird’s meticulous performances and Dosh’s manipulated grooves. Lugubrious pitch-shifted drums lumber across “Souverian”; the canter and shuffle of “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” ultimately careens into a spooky, swirling meltdown of queasy violin and bowed bass.

Bird’s favorite instrument is probably the English language itself. He’s still unable to resist a geeky portmanteau (“Anonanimal”), a smirking pun (“Fitz & Dizzyspells”), even the occasional palindrome. But we should be grateful he’s transcending pop clichés. You can get away with plenty of too-clever-by-half lyrical stunts if they’re buttressed by such brilliant arrangements and beguiling melodies.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader .

Listen Now to a Streaming Track:
"Masterswarm" by Andrew Bird from Noble Beast 

Once an obscure subset of reggae, the music known as dub has mutated into a remarkably broad category, with digital-age DJs applying its looping, backmasking, slice-and-dice aesthetic to all sorts of music, from punk to house to world. On A Town Called Addis, veteran British producer Nick Page—a.k.a. Dub Colossus—taps traditional Ethiopian sounds and state-of-the-art mixology to create a modern dub classic.

From the first bright horn bursts, psychedelic sound effects, pulsing groove, and honeyed vocals of “Azmari Dub,” the album grabs listeners’ attention with its hyper-defined sounds. It’s the exact opposite of a murky mix, tantalizing the ear with a Sgt. Pepper–like landscape of sonic doodads and textures while respecting the Ethiopian music at its core. Page creates spectacular settings for rustic instruments such as the messenqo one-string fiddle, the washint flute, and the kraar harp and unveils surprise talents including the singer Sintayehu Zenebe, whom Page has called “the Edith Piaf of Ethiopia.”

If the music at times resembles jazz, it’s the cosmic, far-out jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and if it occasionally enters the Afrobeat realm, it’s the funky turf of the master, Fela Kuti. But the music owes perhaps its largest debt to dub innovators from Lee “Scratch” Perry to the Clash, who were mashing up music long before Pro Tools came along. Dub is no longer dismissed as the work of stoners who spent too long at the mixing board, but has come into its own as a vital form full of endless possibilities. Dub Colossus exploits them to their fullest.

STREAMING TRACK: "Azmari Dub" by Dub Colossus from A Town Called Addis

Listen Now:

 Azmari Dub: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Americans delight in bashing French movie clichés—the cigarettes! the adultery! the self-conscious seriousness! French films are perhaps an easy target for mockery. Still, I can’t help but laugh at this particularly creative send-up, a bit of one Netflix user’s review of François Ozon’s See the Sea, singled out by the blog A Whine Colored Sea:

Key elements to a french movie - slow as thick snot in January - moral depravity - infidelity - boobs are shown, sometimes crotch - people smoking…

These do not make for essential viewing:

Only recommended if you enjoy activities like sewing your head to the carpet…

Image by Nils Alsleben, licensed under Creative Commons.

Rotten Tomatoes is a movie review aggregator that scores films on a “freshness” scale of 0 to 100 percent. In some cases, as with the recent cinematic catastrophe Meet the Spartans (2 percent freshness), the reviews showcase more comedic ability than the film itself. I’ve compiled some review highlights into a greatest hits recap. Enjoy:

Meet the Spartans isn’t a real movie, so this isn’t a real review, either.¹

Yes, crotch-flashing celebutantes and macho gladiator epics are rife for spoofing. It’s just too bad the job has been entrusted to Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the witless, Dumpster-diving duo who wouldn’t know satire if it puked on their faces.² When the comedy revolution comes, Friedberg and Seltzer will be the first ones shot.³ The filmmakers have one basic joke—that there’s something a little bit gay about all these buff Spartans—and they work it into the ground, trotting out every dumb homosexual panic joke in recorded history.⁴

This thing is so utterly lackluster, so without spirit or humor or energy of any kind, that the characters have to tell you what the joke is.

“Oh, look!” they say. “It’s Paris Hilton!” Like that.⁵

What’s the point of making a parody that’s dumber than the stuff it parodies?⁶ For example, the film starts with an old man examining an infant while a narrator tells us that in ancient Sparta all the babies were carefully checked for defects. This is a fine setup for a lot of potentially funny sight gags: What might this baby’s “defect” be? Then comes the reveal: It’s a baby Shrek. Why? Because Shrek the Third was recently a popular movie. The baby Shrek says something with a Scottish accent and then pukes all over the old man. Why? Because puke is funny. Aren’t you laughing just thinking about it?⁷

It’s so bad even Carmen Electra should be embarrassed.⁸ Electra proves herself a national treasure as our highest-priced whore.⁹

In their deeply ingrained tradition of something less than mediocrity, Friedberg and Seltzer make their annual locustlike descent on theaters leaving a trail of ruthlessly murdered brain cells in their wake.¹⁰

It’s not even a movie. It’s just a thing.¹¹ I’m moving to Europe.¹²

—Erik Helin

(Sources: 1. Sun Media; 2. Detroit News; 3. EricDSnider.com; 4. Mountain Xpress; 5. Sun Media; 6. Newsday; 7. EricDSnider.com; 8. Detroit News; 9. Village Voice; 10. Mountain Xpress; 11. Mountain Xpress; 12. Village Voice)

Publicly ranking one’s favorite books, films, and albums seems to pass for critical blessing these days. Truth be told, I’m not so sure that making recommendations in list form is a new phenomenon—the Ten Commandments have a whiff of recommendation, don’t they? Still, most contemporary publications love to offer top-ten lists or best-of-the-year lists. (Hell, read any issue of Mental Floss.)

And then there’s Time Enough At Last, A.J. Michel’s “reading log 2007,” a zine she assembled simply to share—in just a few sentences—whether she loved, liked, didn’t mind, or couldn’t finish a particular book, comic, or zine. Michel’s month-by-month breakdown of what she’s read offers no snarky rankings, but it’s sassy enough to be pretty entertaining. She sensibly sticks to the basic premise of a few sentences’ worth of evaluation. After all, she can’t waste time reviewing when she ought to be out trying to satisfy her insatiable need for reading material:

Plane trips and vacations are a nightmare because not only do I have to pick and choose what books to take, I have to decide if to stow them in checked luggage, or carry them on. What happens if the plane is stuck on the runway for six hours and I finish not only the books I have with me, but also the airline magazine, and SkyMall catalog? Do I start hitting up other passengers for books? Best to be prepared.

If you have a similar need, perhaps Time Enough At Last can be your guide.

—Michael Rowe