I wouldn't have used "bad", myself, because there are reviews that are as inept as the lousiest of books and I want to reserve "bad" for them. I'd have used "negative". Although I guess inept might do.
Bad reviews are a basic fact of literary life, you might have thought. There are so many different kinds of literary taste, that no book can be all things to all readers. One person’s comfort reading is another’s trash, and what’s thought-provoking to one is high-faluting nonsense to another. But the essential subjectivity of taste is hard to keep in mind when it’s your favourite book that’s getting a pasting: what seemed to the reviewer to be a careful and evidence-based summary of the book’s failing, seems to you to be an attack on your taste, your culture, and your personality. To criticize something you like is tantamount to criticizing you, and that’s personal, damn it!
It’s this reaction, I think, that explains why responses to bad reviews so often take the form of personal attacks on the reviewer. In fact, there’s such a standard playbook of responses, that you can play along at home:
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james_nicoll
2012-01-31 05:26 pm (UTC)
I'll accept that, yes. I think the narrowing of your position on when things are about the text and when they are not gives you more problems when it comes to the points about ethical and moral problems, but it doesn't give me any real difficulties for the current position, since the real issue is that people claimed that the title "The Two Towers" was a reference to the WTC tragedy and therefore disapproved of the title. Which is clearly a claim about the text, and the additional issues about anyone's presumed motivations for choosing that title can safely be parked, for now.