Journey to the heart

Hello again,

This reaches you late today because I work with all social media blocked from my laptop, using this app Cold Turkey, which I would really recommend. It is pretty watertight. Anyway, today I blocked substack having not scheduled the below so here it is now.

I had been thinking for a while to write a list of what I think makes for a good or bad book review. As in one I would read and think “Oh yeah that’s worth paying attention to” or “that’s honest”. I generally hate book discourse on here, and on Twitter too. It usually just isn’t smart or interesting. You see the same repeated circular arguments or bad faith claims or a real overinvestment in grouping things based on the identity of the author rather than the content of the book. It all feels to me like it’s conducted by people who don’t really like reading and so, who don’t read very much. You might think, Why would anyone who doesn’t like reading want to talk publicly all the time about books? I often ask myself the same question.

Anyway I was making my list. One big thing for me is textual evidence. I always think claims about the overarching style or sensibility, especially big, grand claims, should be backed up by stuff from the book.

Anything about the writing style, and especially if this is super worshipful (a thrilling new generational talent, a startling voice) or super derogatory (pedestrian on a sentence level) should have a quote which exemplifies the claim made and which also speaks, in a meaningful and genuinely representative way, to the writing in the book. By which I mean, for example, that in literally anyone’s writing you can find the occasional functional sentence, but is it fair to say this is all their work consists of? Or even what it mostly consists of?

This doesn’t sound like an exotic thing to expect. And yet. It is actually really pretty rare. The grandest claims too, I notice, are often the ones not underpinned by any evidence. I suppose this is because it’s hard to find a sentence which matches the hyperbole of a description like “a thrilling new generational voice” or whatever. But why then use that description? Why not use one which is positive, but which is also grounded in reality, instead?