Complete Review and International Literature

I don’t think there’s a reviewer, or publication, in America that’s as diverse as Michael Orthofer’s Complete Review. Nor as meticulous about record keeping and self-aware about its reviewing trends.

Back in 2004, Michael started the How International Are We? report to find out how good of a job he was doing in reviewing books from around the world. At the time, Complete Review contained 1,200 reviews, two-thirds of which were books originally written in English.

Every 100 reviews (which happens about every six months or less—how does he do this?!) he posts an update to this report looking at the makeup of the most recent batch of reviews. He’s now up to 2,200 reviews total, and of the past 100, only 21 were written in English, whereas 23 were originally written in French. He also added a couple new languages, and has now reviewed books from 50 different languages. He also posted a chart with all the relevant data. Interestingly, books originally written in English now make up 50% of the 2,200 reviews—a much smaller percentage than the 66% it was back four years ago.