So many books, cont’d

Some interesting responses are rolling in about both Laura Miller’s NYT essay and my own take on the whole matter. First, Bookdwarf chimes in from a bookseller’s point of view:

Working at a bookstore, I get calls every day from an author who wants us to carry her/his book. You know what? Most of them are crap. Sure, it is just my opinon, but a lot of things should just never be published. Many are books that an author has self-published. But many are from big name publishers. Need I mention the Bill O’Reilly book coming in the Fall The O’Reilly Factor for Kids? Frankly, a lot of these books are just too hard for us to get. The discounts suck and we have to order more than we need. Sometimes it is just not worth it for us. Plus, like I said earlier, many of the self-published stuff is crap. And I agree with her about how it is hard to keep up with all the new books. I read pretty quickly too, but my TBR list seems to grow exponentially.

Amen, brother. And I remember all too well the parade of authors begging and pleading for us to carry his or her self-pubbed book, deaf to the fact that if a major distributor didn’t carry it, neither would we…

Then, Steve Miller makes a valuable point:

I don’t disagree with you, Laura Miller, David Montgomery or Jim Fusilli. There is a flood of books being published, and too many of them are unable to sustain any degree of critical reading past page 50. I too shudder sometimes when I come home from work to find a UPS shipment from one publisher or another.

But may I offer one observation? Compare the award winners for Best First for this year (or any recent year) with its brethren from twenty years ago.

Edgars 2004: Martha Conway, Olen Steinhauer, Rebecca Pawel, James Hime, Robert Heilbrun

Edgars 1984: Will Harriss, Andrew Taylor, Carolyn Wheat, Mark Schorr, Herbert Resnicow

Is there any question that the bar has elevated exponentially in the last two decades? Every single member of the Class of 04 produced a stronger debut work than in 84. Can they sustain this quality? I don’t know. But it does offer a counterargument — sure, there’s too much dreck out there. But the absolute cream of the crop from new writers (not to mention the sheer number of writers at the top of their game — Lippman, Rozan, Phillips, Starr, Connelly, Pelecanos, Lehane, Bruen, Rankin, Mina, and so on) gives me pause. It’s not that there’s too much bad stuff — it’s that the good stuff is so damned fine and plentiful and the gap between the superb and the merely adequate rivals the span of the Brooklyn Bridge.

I think that because the absolute number of books published has increased tremendously in twenty years–hell, in the last five–the number of quality works go up as well. I can’t say for sure if the quality of the Edgar First novel list is truly better than it was 20 years ago, since a) I haven’t read all the current nominees and b) I haven’t read any of the ’84 nominees but my instinct tells me this is so. Certainly, 2003 was, to my mind, a wonderful year for debut novels, and there could have been an entirely different shortlist drafted that would have been acceptable to me. I think the demands for debut fiction (crime novels or otherwise) is far greater, so people must produce better quality work their first time out.

But Miller’s comments also, perversely, strengthen my original post: if there’s so much good stuff out there, how will I be able to read it all? Which just adds to the state of semi-paralysis that emerges when I go into a bookstore…