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

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Granting arguendo the premise that the primary point of a science fiction book review is to serve as as buyer's guide, let's say you have a magazine which publishes somewhere between three and four reviews a month. Would you rather that magazine spend its real estate pointing people toward good books or away from bad books? I would prefer the latter.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

This always comes up but it always ignores the fact you don't know whether a book is good or bad until you've read it.

A reviews editor, particularly one with space that is as limited as in your example, will make decisions about the reviews they wish to commission. This will be based on various factors, one of which is likely to be a guess about the quality of the novel. Anything beyond this would require magic.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

I bet for most books it's the name of the author that's the important decider. A Neal Stephenson book, shitty or not, will get many more reviews than a book, good or not, by an unknown.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

We don't ignore that fact at all--we encourage our reviewers to stop reading books if they don't think they're good, or send them back if they can't review them for some other reason.

(A book which collapses at the end can still be good enough in other ways to be worth reviewing.)

It helps that we are mostly volunteer-driven. (Our reviewers get a small honorarium, but not nearly as much as they deserve. Our reviewers are very good indeed.)

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I was talking about the argument generally, rather NYRSF.

However, I am surprised that you say: "we encourage our reviewers to stop reading books if they don't think they're good, or send them back if they can't review them for some other reason." This certainly wasn't communicated to me when I reviewed for NYRSF.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Really? I thought it was in our standard cover letter. I'll have to check that, because it's certainly our intent, and if it wasn't communicated to you, that's a failing on our end.

[avram]

Don't you mean "the former"?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Argh yes of course yes.