Having grown up in a staunchly Mormon family, even serving a two year mission for my church – at my expense – I especially resonate with these concepts. In all of the religious studying I have done, it has never occurred me that it is always the children that suffer. Isaac at the hand of Abraham, Pharaoh in Egypt’s own son and the sons he sent his soldiers to murder, God sending his own son to suffer, and so on. In word, who can possibly believe in a god who demands a father murder his own child.

When someone is raised in a particular religion, told repeatedly that it is the only true church (as was my case in Mormonism) , it is almost impossible to get out. Not the organization per se, although that is challenging because they just don’t want to let you go, but the idea of God, Heaven and Hell, the years and years of brainwashing that has been drilled into your head since childhood. It takes a long time for the guilt to go away. Not the guilt that now you are doing things that we strictly forbidden by the organization, but the guilt of wondering if you were wrong to leave that organization, if it were right after all. If you have turned your back on god. It’s the notion and existence of god that is hard to get out of.

Terry–yes, talk about getting someone else to do the heavy lifting for you! (re that quote, which doesn’t make much sense). I agree about editors. I think editors need to be more proactive. One problem is that there isn’t much money in reviewing, especially outside of places like the Post, etc.

JV

As to #5, don’t know if you’re following the 2008 Tournament of Books, but one reviewer started her comparison of Marianne Wiggins’s The Shadow Catcher and Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England thusly:

“Fredric Jameson says of Adorno’s use of Freud:

‘Neurosis is simply this boring imprisonment of the self in itself, crippled by its terror of the new and unexpected, carrying its sameness with it wherever it goes, so that it has the protection of feeling, whatever it might stretch out its hand to touch, that it never meets anything but what it knows already.’

“He might have been writing of The Shadow Catcher and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.”

I confess that, despite 45 years of constant reading (starting at age 6), an undergraduate degree in English, a graduate degree in law, a few post-graduate classes in literary criticism just for fun, and so forth, I hadn’t the faintest idea what the hell the reviewer was getting at.

Finally, I’ve said this before and elsewhere, but I think that a reviewer’s best helper is an editor. It’s also the hardest thing to come across in this day and age, it seems, and more so if you’re a decent writer to begin with (that is, one who has some facility with grammar and sentence/paragraph structure, and therefore requires little basic line editing, as opposed to some more sophisticated work on how to write a better review). So one simply soldiers on, hoping to improve with experience. After all, the more you write, the better you get, or so the theory goes.

Yes, but I think they are less likely to actually be working with some of the writers, editors and publishers. Because many writers are also editors and many of the publishers are the people we send books to. It is true that in a perfect world this wouldn’t change anything. But I think most people are not that open-minded. That is one reason I think most people really don’t say what they think.

On another note, I think reviewers in general try to take on a sort of fair and balanced approach, which mimics the MSM. You are not allowed to simply pan a book, but have to look for something positive to say. In the same way you can’t just praise a book.

It all sort of reminds me of those progress assessments many people get at their jobs (or sometimes you fill them out yourself), where you have to list “accomplishments” as well as “areas for improvement”.

Anyways, great post, but when a book is REALLY bad I think sarcasm is welcome.

But I do agree that a great many who write or review (or both) do fear hurting another’s opinions. But if we’re so conscientious of that as to prevent us from giving an honest appraisal that might help another with his/her writing/reviews, then what will they (or us) learn in the process? It’s just one of those situations with nary an easy answer, I fear.