clipped from: grahamnunn.wordpress.com Don Share’s post on Harriet (a blog from the poetry foundation), I Hate Poetry … Reviews? raises some other interesting points and provides an excellent link to George Orwell’s article, Confessions of Book Reviewer. This is a brilliant read; his portrait of the book reviewer made me laugh until it hurt, and he goes on to offer an interesting solution to the reviewing debate:
“The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews–1,000 words is a bare minimum–to the few that seem to matter… but the usual middle-length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless …”
And while this has a lot of merit, particularly the 1000 words as a bare minimum for a review, who decides which books matter? There are no easy answers …