It must be enheartening to Open Letters readers: month after month, they’re served live ammunition! Every month, across a wide variety of subjects, they’re given long, involved, highly detailed (and, of course, highly readable) reviews that can then stand them in good stead later on, should they encounter less felicitous (and inevitably shorter) reviews of those same books elsewhere. Read a shoddy, lazy review of some noteworthy new release in, say, The New Republic or Harper’s? Wait for the Open Letters review to get the full story and some refreshingly reasoned discourse!

A variation on the phenomenon holds true even in literary publications that are top-notch. In such venues (The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the good folks over at Quarterly Conversation), where book reviews are given space and time to unfold and dig deep, Open Letters still comes in handy, as counter-ballast, as an expert second opinion.

Take the issue of the mighty TLS for 20 June 2008, for example: in no less than four separate places, that issue weighs in on titles already covered at Open Letters, and in each case, the contrasts are striking.

First is Lidija Haas’ delightful overview of several contemporary romance novels, “Vagaries of Love.” This piece is a bravura performance whose opening deserves to be quoted in full:

Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art, puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal. And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind – Martin Amis does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of Evidence – and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it. Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel, remains apparently beyond rescue – it is too embarrassing, too silly, too feminine to be salvageable. The comic book becomes the graphic novel, science fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love story can be nothing but itself.

This is hilarious and entirely debatable stuff, and one of the books Haas uses in her piece is The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett, about which Haas writes:

Barrett’s novel is uneasy in tone; it cannot decide what it is aiming for, at some moments moodily imagining time “clotted like blood in a bowl”. at others uncomfortably entangled by the mechanics of the plot…

Back in November of 2007, stalwart Open Letters writer Karen Vanushka tackled Barrett’s novel (at considerably greater length than Haas’ broad survey piece would allow). Take a look to see how she found The Air We Breathe!

A few pages later in the TLS there’s Colin Shindler’s brief review of 1948 by Benny Morris – only what follows Shindler’s by-line isn’t really much of a review. Shindler has a bad case of reviewer-itis: he writes about what Morris writes about, but he virtually never writes about Morris’ writing. The most he risks doing, somewhat lamely, is to suggest that 1948 might have been a more complete book if Morris had had access to sealed Arabic sources. Since this would be true of any book on the subject (and since it’s the abiding pity of all sealed sources), it’s not a very helpful verdict.

Fortunately, in this very month, June of 2008, Open Letters‘ own Greg Waldmann also reviews Morris’ book, in minute detail and with lots of emotion broiling right there on the surface. It’s a good example of what Shindler shies away from doing.

Turn the page in the TLS and you encounter Peter Pesic’s review of Mark Penn’s Microtrends, in which he writes: “Penn’s book is a collection of seventy-five such microtrends, presented as brief “sound bites” which, despite attempts to make them lively, become tedious through accumulation.”

To learn the full, horrific extent of that tedium, look no further than October 2007 of Open Letters, where Penn’s book by turns baffles and outrages Nonfiction Editor Steve Donoghue.

And lastly there’s Saswato R. Das’ short review of George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiements, which he characterizes as “a very personal odyssey through the annals of science, touching on a few eclectic milestones.”

Once again, the June 2008 Open Letters issue will come in handy: the redoubtable Lianne Habinek gives Johnson’s book a long and thorough examination, one that will particularly satisfy TLS readers who came away from Das’ piece wanting more.

That more is what Open Letters strives to provide its readers each month. The thrill of being part of the same conversation as legendary publications like the TLS is a big part of the reward.