Last month, the National Book Critics Circle lifted a page from the Litblog Coop's playbook, deciding that it would start posting book recommendations based on the ostensibly sensible idea that "finding out what a lot of people said was good" was itself good. Unlike the LBC, which has 21 members settling on one work of fiction four times a year, the NBCC decided to run with five books each in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as hashed out by "nearly 500 voters," starting with a 2007 recap and moving into monthly recommendations next month.

So what did all those luminaries determine to be "good" reading? As Jeff Gomez points out on his Print Is Dead blog, pretty much what you'd expect them to pick, including the National Book Award winner in each of the three categories. "They're the same damn books everyone else is telling us to read," Gomez complains; actually, when you think about it, many of the voters are "everyone else," which is to say the people who've been reviewing these books—okay, maybe not the poetry collections—for mainstream outlets all year long. "Like, do we really need [500 voters] to tell us to read the new Philip Roth? The guy has been a literary powerhouse for almost half a century, and this is the overlooked gem their panel of experts has chosen to surface?"

In fairness to the Circle, though, they never actually promised that a massive experiment in groupthink would lead to the discovery of "overlooked gems," and it's not as if there's likely to be any serious duds among the books they did pick. (It will be interesting, frankly, to see how these lists compare with the NBCC award shortlists when those come out in a few months.) But one might say that it was this kind of narrow thinking, producing the same old results only with a great deal more self-promotional fanfare, that led bookbloggers to jumpstart their own conversations online, about the books they didn't think weren't getting talked about enough, and then led a bunch of them (including, at the outset, me) to launch the LBC as a test of the "strength through numbers" theory. And the NBCC's selections become even more ironic when you consider that the organization's president, John Freeman, when solicited to opine for a LA Times summation of publishing's 2007, chose to describe "part of the problem [as] the way bookselling is becoming a winner-take-all game, with the lion's share of promotion going to a few bestselling authors, leaving the rest to fend for themselves in an ever-more-crowded publishing environment."

Mind you, Freeman also believes, as LAT correspondent Scott Timberg frames his argument, that "the way to keep book coverage up is to remind people of the importance of reviews and the books they discuss," spectacularly missing the point as he and most of his cohorts have all year long. Book reviewers didn't manage to lose a significant chunk of their newspaper audiences, not to mention in many cases the confidence of their management, because people couldn't remember how important book reviewing was to the upkeep of civilization. Far from it. To the extent that readers have chosen to devalue book reviewing, they have done so because (a) a number of book reviewers stopped being interesting to them and (b) other people, who were judged to actually have something meaningful to say about books, arose to take their place—first online and then, the way things are going, in the mainstream media as well. The way to keep book coverage up isn't to wag your finger at readers and insist "[books] need to be sifted for the public, to see what matters"—it's to get better and more creative at talking about books and the culture they sustain.