![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
favorovBecause of the insistence of the writer and her publishers Bloomsbury on releasing the book at midnight on Friday - with no advance review copies - the Guardian convened what is believed to be the world's first ever speed-reviewing team.
Five young assistants - not that young because it was past the target audience's bed-time - joined me in a specially prepared rapid-analysis room in West London where the books were rushed from the Waterstone's branch in Notting Hill precisely as the clocks ticked over from weekday into weekend. Will McEwan, Robin Houston, Victoria Briggs, Sally James-Gregory, Imogen Tilden and myself took 128 pages each in order to file a group-review for the final edition of the Saturday Guardian. That done, I speed-read on through the night alone, filing this more considered piece at breakfast time.
Writers and publishers may say that no book should be reviewed like this. Well, yes. But no book should be published like this. Rowling and Bloomsbury have turned literature into news, with all the embargos and immediacy that entails. To adopt a tone appropriate to a book about schoolchildren: they started it.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10761,982214,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/0,10761,520918,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/22/npott22.xml
Five young assistants - not that young because it was past the target audience's bed-time - joined me in a specially prepared rapid-analysis room in West London where the books were rushed from the Waterstone's branch in Notting Hill precisely as the clocks ticked over from weekday into weekend. Will McEwan, Robin Houston, Victoria Briggs, Sally James-Gregory, Imogen Tilden and myself took 128 pages each in order to file a group-review for the final edition of the Saturday Guardian. That done, I speed-read on through the night alone, filing this more considered piece at breakfast time.
Writers and publishers may say that no book should be reviewed like this. Well, yes. But no book should be published like this. Rowling and Bloomsbury have turned literature into news, with all the embargos and immediacy that entails. To adopt a tone appropriate to a book about schoolchildren: they started it.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10761,982214,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/0,10761,520918,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/22/npott22.xml
