Apologies for the late arrival – yet again – of this column. But it's all in a good cause. In last week's thread AggieH began a discussion on critical authority:
Having just stalked two fine readers around the Internet in order to read specifically their reviews of one book … a thought struck me. Random reader reviews don't interest me. I don't browse for them, here or elsewhere. But if I am aware of their existence, I do read reviews by posters whose judgement I have learned to trust. Much in the same way that I read reviews by a few selected serious book bloggers.
She went on to complain about the frustrations of our own search system for reviews, pointing out that it is currently only possible to search for reviews by book title, and wondering why it was not possible to have user profiles for reviewers, as there are for commenters.
I wonder if I am allowed to suggest that users of this site who have written reviews for Amazon or other book sites in the past might want to repost those reviews here? Guardian moderators, if there's something unethical about this suggestion please feel free to delete it.
Well, AggieH, we've been mulling over your suggestions and have made one small innovation, which is to introduce a "Your reviews" slot in the community space on the books front, where we will now feature individual reviews. If your review is featured in it, drop Hannah an email at hannah.freeman@theguardian.com and we'll send you a book from our cupboards.
But your suggestion about reposting reviews that have been posted elsewhere set some bigger cogs turning, and I'd like to turn it into a question for all of you in our books community. Some of you have your own blogs anyway. How would you feel about us giving them a platform on the books site, along the lines of this Our Other Blogs space on the science site?
And how many of you would be interested in self-publishing your reviews in your own designated space, if we could make editing tools available to you? Even if you would not want to review yourselves, would you be interested in having this enhanced access to AggieH's "trusted reviewers"?
Do let us know. But don't let it stop you discussing your current reading. For what it's worth, I reread Will Self's Umbrella at the weekend, because I was due to interview him at the London Book Fair.
It's one of those novels that comes to life the second time round: with the benefit of knowing what is going on, the richness of the construction becomes clear, right down to those pirouetting modernist sentences which can spin you off on a dizzying sixty-year journey in sixty words.
In the meantime, here are some of the books we're reviewing this week:
Non-fiction
• Cities are Good for you by Leo Hollis
• Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
• Who is Ozymandias and other Puzzles in Poetry by John Fuller
• The Invention of the Land of Israel by Shlomo Sand
Fiction
• The Hit by Melvin Burgess
• Brief Loves that Live Forever by Andrei Makine
Book of the week
• Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4
