The inequity of criticism

As regular readers of this blog will know, it gets updated a couple of times every week with much more text than most blogs. The reason is that I have large archives of journalistic work sitting on my hard drive and it seems a shame not to use it here. So a couple of times a week, I dig out a book review or interview that’s already been published somewhere and post it here. The only caveat is that I only post things in my blog which are already available online elsewhere. I also only post things which I am pretty sure I won’t sell again – book reviews are quite time sensitive things, so once they’ve been and gone, I tend to just post them here.

Anyway, onto the subject of today’s entry. The review below this blog entry - for Sean Harnett's Aisling Ltd - ran earlier this year in an Irish national newspaper. It's notable for two reasons - one is that I actually worked in a 'dot com' organisation in 2000 so it ticked lots of boxes for me - I recognised lots of silliness in the fictional company in the book except that I actually saw much of it for real in the company I worked for. However the other reason it's notable is that the author runs a website that linked to my piece when it appeared, and he understandably wasn't thrilled about the review I gave him.

(He also pointed out that apparently I spelled his name wrong in my copy - changing it from Harnett to Hartnett. Mistakes like that always annoy me, so I'm sure they annoy others as well and in this case, Mr Harnett was well within his rights to take me task for it. I stand corrected.)

It's always interesting to see how other publications and other reviewers treat books that you've also reviewed - at the end of the day, it's all highly subjective and a book I think isn't any good could be someone else's ideal read. On Mr Harnett's website he has linked to lots of other reviews which raved about this book. I was surprised when I saw them - I enjoyed it but wasn't blown away.

It was based on a good idea, but it just wasn't very well realised. However, my opinion is just one opinion, no more no less - there is no great qualification or job requirement to be a book reviewer, although being able to read quickly does help. Just express an interest and be in the right place at the right time. Be good at it in the opinion of the commissioning editor and you might get more work doing it. It’s that simple.

However, this incident does bring home one unfortunate truth about reviewing other people’s work. It would be fantastic if you only got given excellent books to read, but sadly that can’t happen because not only excellent books are published.

So sometimes you get a stinker – not in this case, Aisling Ltd isn’t dreadful by any means, it’s just not excellent – but sometimes you get a dreadful book and you are asked to give it as much of an impartial and unbiased review as you can. I am not by nature a cruel or harsh person (unlike some journalists who seem to delight in being as unpleasant as they can in their writing), so I don’t look forward to kicking people in the national press who have slaved hard over a precious book.

So what do you do when a book lands on your desk that’s just dreadful? Well, it doesn’t happen too often because publishers are in the business of making money and publishing bad books that won’t sell isn’t a great way to do that.

Naturally, they only publish what they think there is a market for. Nevertheless, hundreds of books arrive into a newspaper office every month - far more than can be reviewed. The publishers actually go out of their way to send the books in, in the hope that they will beat the slush pile and get reviewed and that a good review might add to the sales figures.

However at the same time, people like me have a duty to the readers of the newspapers that employ us to make sure that we give them all the information they need to decide if they would like to buy this book or not. I applaud anyone for getting off their backside and writing a book anyway, so in my view, you're already ahead before I open the first page. However, sometimes, it’s necessary to be truthful and honest in your assessment, but that’s the nature of the game.

People who read this blog regularly will know that I’m currently working on a novel myself. When the time comes, it will probably get reviewed and it will have to stand or fall on its own merits. A thought which will no doubt comfort those more experienced writers who have ever been on the receiving end of kicking they felt was underserved.