In my experience, some paid reviewers are a deal less well-informed than many bloggers

Oct 29, 2012 16:07


Hedjog sings the old, old story - reviewer appears to have a very restricted knowledge of field relating to book on which they are commenting.

This isn't exactly breaking news - it's actually a review in a rather ageing copy of London Review of Books that I've finally opened.

Anyway, the bit that had me going 'WHUT - teh iggerance b burnin', was not actually about book under discussion but waffling about earlier book by same author, which set out to show
that having a baby involves pain, boredom, drudgery, exhaustion and sleeplessness

and came out in 2001 'before Mummylit properly got going'.

I can only say that, funny, when I was a growing girl in the 1960s, there was what seemed to be a huge amount of literary fiction on the theme We Wuz Lied To About Teh Joyz of Maternity, not to mention sociological studies, feminist polemics, etc.

It's not something that was suddenly discovered in the C21st.

I realise that being a reviewer for one of the heavier lit periodicals doesn't required an exam and you can even be one of the editors of the LRB without a particularly solid grounding in The Serious Woman's Novel since 1950.

But I am still not persuaded that Real Reviewers are really in a position to snark at book bloggers.

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women, ignorance, blogging, reviews, books, history, litfic, novel, litcrit

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