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Date: 2010-03-22 09:32 am (UTC)
jack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jack
"so disgusted by the misrepresentations that she threw the book across the room"

Ouch :) I occasionally feel the same way about books where I have specialised domain knowledge[1], even occasionally ones where they scratched an itch really well, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. Obviously some books are accurate in detail, and some books give the right feel even if they're awful, but I'm not sure how to accept books that exactly fulfil my fantasies, especially subtly.

Asimov's Foundation is great propaganda for "heroic scientists understand things and are better than everyone else" even though the details are lamentably false, but I don't have a problem with it becasue I'm (mostly) happy with the moral. Whereas "Lord of Light" seems to have a message something like "some people are just better than the unwashed masses, and the most liberal one of them is really cool" which many fantasy books share, and definitely appeals to my sense of intellectual elitism, but ever since I thought to describe it like that has made me uncomfortable. Of course, I'm always embarrassed to admit a book scratches a particular itch at all, because I'm embarrassed to admit my mind has subjective emotional needs in its stories at all, let alone uncomfortable ones.

Of course, if you can write a review identifying WHAT appealed to you about a book, it is a very useful review because "people who like X will think it's awesome and other people may not" is much more objectively useful than "I thought it was awesome and I can't explain why and people can self-select until only people who agree with most of my biases listen to my reviews[2]"

[1] Sometimes including "commonsense knowledge of human nature"

[2] I've quoted this before, but one poor friend and I have always sucked at choosing books for each other. I feel like I at least made an _effort_ to take into account the sort of things he liked, though he may disagree, but we kept having conversations like (heavily fictionalised in my favour):

Him: Oh, you'll love [eg. Angels and Demons], really you will!
Me: But I didnd't like Da Vince Code.
Him: But this is much better!
Me: Do you mean "it's objectively better, including improving the things I perceieve as flaws" or "it does all of the same things the first book did that you liked and I didn't, but more so"?
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Soundbite

Miscellaneous. Eclectic. Random. Perhaps markedly literate, or at least suffering from the compulsion to read any text that presents itself, including cereal boxes.

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