Jenny Davidson has a nice little excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates on good reviews. Here's the part I liked best:
Obviously, a critic who "likes everything" is a very bland personality hardly to be trusted, but there might be a respectable category of critic who, disliking something, refrains from making public comment on it. In America, do we need to caution anyone against buying a book?
As readers know, I've been going back and forth on this whole issue of "too much good reviews" and although I have been tempted to run a list of books I have read that I don't like, I just really don't want to do that. It doesn't seem fair when none of them are horrible, I just don't like them enough to recommend them. It's nice to see that Oates has a similar philosophy to my own - yes, there are books we don't like, but we just don't tell the world about them. Better to put our energy into the books we do love, a much more worthwhile pursuit I'm sure.
