From the comments to a james_nicoll post: Reviews and good books

[womzilla]

In a discussion of a magazine that purportedly only runs "positive" reviews, rosefox makes the case for writing and publishing reviews of bad books:

Unless the goal of the review is to talk about the interesting parts of a book and how they damage or point to flaws in the genre. "Interesting" is not always the same thing as "good", and it's certainly not the same thing as "not worth examining critically". Sometimes a book's flaws are the most interesting thing about it.

montoya makes the counterargument:

Most of the bad books I read are bad in boring ways. Too dull, characters I don't care about, cliched, whatever. Very few are bad in interesting ways.

I add:

Yes. As I think I said in a comment elsewhere, one of the types of review of a bad book that we will sometimes run is one that points to a larger failing.

Of course, discussing the weaknesses of good books usually points out those larger failings as well--it's a rare book that has a flaw that nothing else in the world shares.

("We" of course is NYRSF; we were not the subject of the original discussion, as nearly as I can tell--it was all done without proper nouns-- but our stated policy is that we desire reviews "which reveal the strengths and weaknesses of good books". These tend to be positive reviews, although sometimes they're not.)

Interestingly, the only other venue for which I've ever written reviews professionally--Games Magazine--also only publishes reviews of good games. There, it's definitely because they only have room to discuss four board games per issue, so the editor doesn't want to waste space on bad games.

Comments

[nppyinzer.livejournal.com]

I stopped writing theater reviews because I disagreed with my editor on this subject. The last play I reviewed was quite bad in a number of quantifiable ways. I wanted to include them in the review, because I thought the only way that the director, actors, or theater company would get better would be to know about the flaws so they could correct them in the future; my editor told me, "If it's good, say that it's good. If it's bad, don't say anything."

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Was the play overall good, but with flaws, or just bad?

I would never expect a reviewer to review a work and not discuss its weaknesses as well as its strengths--that's dishonest all around. That's why NYRSF's is phrased the way it is--"reveal the strengths and weaknesses of good books".

There are some differences in the dynamics of a theater review column (or a TV or film review column, for that matter) than in a book review column. It's possible for a publication, especially a newspaper, to review a significant percentage of the major theatrical works, movies, or television shows in the course of business; in such a case, noting the strengths and weaknesses of a bad work would be part of the endeavor of reviewing everything. (And there are very few major works so bad that they don't have some strengths.) No publication I've ever seen can review every book, even in a limited genre--rosefox is the f&sf review of PW, which reviews I think a dozen f&sf books a week, which is a small fraction of the total output of the field--and those reviews are only 200 words long, which is too little space to provide any real support for the reviewers' assertions.