{"id":15212,"date":"2008-11-17T09:50:39","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T14:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=15212"},"modified":"2014-06-27T14:36:53","modified_gmt":"2014-06-27T18:36:53","slug":"joe-queenans-sweet-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2008\/11\/17\/joe-queenans-sweet-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Queenan&#8217;s sweet talk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Queenan writes in an essay titled &#8220;Enough With the Sweet Talk&#8221; in <i>The New York Times<\/i><\/a> that the main problem with book reviews isn&#8217;t the wrongly negative critique but  rather the falsely effusive one:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Books are described as being &#8220;compulsively readable,&#8221; when they are merely &#8220;O.K.&#8221;; &#8220;jaw-droppingly good,&#8221; when they are actually &#8220;not bad&#8221;; &#8220;impossible to put down,&#8221; when they are really &#8220;no worse than the last three.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Authors are described as a cross between Madame de Sta\u00ebland and Arthur Conan Doyle, or are said to write like Charlotte Bront\u00eb on acid, or have out-Dostoyevskied Dostoyevsky and checkmated Euripides, when they are more of a cross between Candace Bushnell and Ngaio Marsh, or write like Willa Cather on Robitussin-DM, or have been narrowly out-Mavis Gallanted by Mavis Gallant, and were lucky to play Edna Ferber to a draw.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ve always said that I&#8217;d rather be hated for what I am than loved for what I&#8217;m not, but now it strikes me that  I wouldn&#8217;t mind some unearned praise now and then &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Queenan writes in an essay titled &#8220;Enough With the Sweet Talk&#8221; in The New York Times that the main problem with book reviews isn&#8217;t the wrongly negative critique but rather the falsely effusive one: Books are described as being &#8220;compulsively readable,&#8221; when they are merely &#8220;O.K.&#8221;; &#8220;jaw-droppingly good,&#8221; when they are actually &#8220;not bad&#8221;; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[516,517],"class_list":["post-15212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-joe-queenan","tag-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15213,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15212\/revisions\/15213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}