Wednesday, August 02, 2017

The limits of critique...

...Literary desire
There is an admirable humility here, one that takes seriously the experiences of the person sometimes condescendingly called the “common reader”: someone like yourself, when you read for no other reason than because you like to. These readers find themselves drawn into the works of Tolkien, or Austen, or David Foster Wallace, or Anne Tyler, or Eugene Vodolazkin, or whomever not because they want to diagnose something that is wrong with these books, but because they offer an experience of . . . well, something that seems inchoately but truly worthwhile and pleasurable.

3 comments:

  1. Vikri, your excerpt nails the big difference between reviewers and critics. Being a review myself, I prefer reviewers (people passionate about books and reading) rather than critics (too often nattering nabobs of negativism).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pardon: Vikram not Vikri. (Damned keyboard!)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi RT, yes, it's important to me to seek joy in reading and that can hardly happen if one is only critiquing.

    ReplyDelete