To a far greater extent we can trust our fellow readers here. So can we trust professional critics now any more than we can trust marketing departments to give us an honest assessment of the worth of a book? The answer, of course, is no. I’m presently reading a novel which according to The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe is the work of a rare genius the truth though is, as any common reader endowed with a functioning critical faculty would no doubt agree, that it’s simply a very ordinary novel with no distinguishing virtue. In the final essay she has a dig at (her) contemporary professional critics. It’s appropriate that my 100th GR review should be a book that attempts to shift literary criticism from the hallowed office into the sitting room as all of us here on Goodreads are “the common reader”, a voice that in Woolf’s day barely existed.
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