The fun of a good negative review, part two.
12 February 2014
Weirdly enough, after posting yesterday's link to a negative review of a business book, I chanced across several other items on the Internet about negative reviews in general. (Weird how that always happens. You're thinking about a topic--and all of a sudden that topic is everywhere.) I try to read whatever I can find on this subject, because certain publications' rules about only allowing "positive" book reviews have always bugged the shit out of me.* If reviews of books just don't appear, then, I always wonder, does that mean they were bad, or that they just weren't considered for review? Lame.
Anyway. I particularly liked this article about the power of saying what we don't like about books, written by Francine Prose and Zoe Heller. What do you think?
*I'll admit I sometimes enjoy writing a negative book review. Here's a couple of my favorite negative reviews from this site. I got a lot of angry comments on the Jen Lancaster one in particular. I enjoy a healthy debate so that was fun.