The editor, writer, and I’m sure very delightful Jennifer Schuessler writes how book reviewers don’t label books boring very often.
Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
Couldn’t you find a more interesting subject to post about? 😉
sigh . . . i don’t know–i just click the links and see the same, old thing overandover
what’s the point
My guess is that few reviewers are willing to pan a product whose advertising dollars pay their salary. I find it interesting that book bloggers feel they need to disclose whether the ten or twenty dollar book they are reviewing was given to them but the New York Times reviewer feels no compunction to specify the portion of the publisher’s annual advertising budget that has been directed towards the Times.
Incidentally, Anton Chekhov’s A Boring Story (also translated as A Dreary Story) is one of his finest. And not boring at all.