If you don't have anything nice to say, maybe you should still say it
On writing negative reviews
I’ve reviewed a few books before and will be reviewing a couple more soon, which has led me to an old dilemma: is it worth writing a negative review?
I recently finished a book of essays that I started reading with the intention of reviewing. I went in blind, having no prior knowledge of the book or the author, other than the information from the back of the book.
It is a bad book. Not so bad that I struggled to finish it — the actual writing was crisp and conversational, and most of the essays were in the range of 10 pages. So it was readable. But even if the writing itself was good, or good enough, there were so many other problems that the sentence-level quality of writing became unimportant.
I won’t detail the book or my criticisms of it here, but this was the first time I actively disliked a book I was planning to review. (I should clarify that personal enjoyment is not in my review criteria; I look at what the book was attempting to do, and how successful it was in executing its ambition.) It brought me to the question: should I write a negative review, or ignore it and move on to the next one?
The rationale for the latter is as small and obvious as you’d guess: review others how you wish to be reviewed. I’ve written a book-length manuscript (don’t ask; it’s bad), so I know how much goes into completing a book. I wouldn’t want to work hard on something and have someone say not-nice things about it. Besides, if I say good things (or nothing, if I wanted to be slightly less dishonest), then maybe they’ll say nice things about my book later on. Plus, since I haven’t published a book, who am I to say someone else’s book sucks? And aren’t we all on the same team as writers, anyway?
In some circumstances there is validity to that thought process. I wouldn’t write a negative review about a book no one has heard of. That just seems unnecessary and cruel. But negative reviews can serve other purposes, like recalibrating consensus, especially since consensus in the world of books can so easily be manipulated by effective promotion and advertising.
I care about writing and good writing specifically, so if I see a book getting numerous glowing reviews that repeat the same lines of praise — praise that is entirely undeserved in my own reading experience — then I should be critical. As long as I’m being honest.
As a writer, I want my work to be read carefully and thoughtfully. If that means it may not hold up under scrutiny, so be it. Criticism is the craft of taking writing seriously, and by extension, taking readers seriously, too. It’s an important pursuit.
I’m sure I wouldn’t feel great if I wrote a book that got shit on by a critic, but should that ever happen, I hope I can take it as a sign of validation that my work is worth taking seriously.
A few things that I would not review negatively:
The Fine Art of Violence Volume Two came out. It’s one of the coolest projects in the MMA world, with art by Chris Rini and essays by some of the best writers in the game. Volume One and the ebook versions of both volumes are also available.
A Korean filmmaker interviews his grandmother about the Seoul neighborhood she grew up in, which is being “developed.” It’ll make you nostalgic for a place you’ve never been.
John Swartzwelder, reclusive comedic genius and the best Simpsons writer ever, sits down with The New Yorker.
May Reads
Review of Tris Dixon’s book Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing by Thomas Hauser, Boxing Scene
Ali preferred to think that boxing was not the cause. I believe this was in part because of his vanity as a great boxer. Also, he didn’t want to think that boxing - which he loved - would cause a condition like his. Anytime someone talks about studies that show an outsized proportion of football players in the United States suffering from CTE, what they're really saying is that football causes brain damage. What was Ali going to do? Get up and say, "I’m talking the way I am because I boxed too long. Boxing did this to me." The next logical thing to say would then be, "Don't box." And Muhammad wasn’t prepared to say that.
I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait by Elizabeth Bruenig, New York Times
One of the things they don’t tell you about having babies is that you don’t ever have a baby; you have your baby, which is, to you, the ur-baby, the sum of all babies. The moment they laid her damp rosy body on my chest, I knew she would envelop my world. I had worried about that very thing. In Sheila Heti’s novel “Motherhood,” the narrator, a cynical writer contemplating whether to have kids before it’s too late, laments the absence of new parents from their friends’ lives, a phenomenon she calls “that relieved and joyful desertion.” “When a person has a child,” she writes, “they are turned towards their child.” The risk of falling off the world haunted me. When you have a baby, you do turn toward your child — that “relieved and joyful desertion” may eventually affect your friends, but it first affects yourself.
What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief. My days began to unfold according to her schedule, that weird rhythm of newborns, and the worries I entertained were better than the ones that came before: more concrete, more vital, less tethered to the claustrophobic confines of my own skull. For this member of a generation famously beset by anxiety, it was a welcome liberation.
I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To by Tim Kreider, The Atlantic
When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.” (That “you know” encompassed a lot that was left unspoken: deteriorating mental health, physical atrophy, creeping alcoholism, unraveling marriages, touch starvation, suicidal ideation, collapse-of-democracy anxiety, Hadean boredom and loneliness, solitary rages and despair.) You could admit that you’d accomplished nothing today, this week, all year. Having gotten through another day was a perfectly respectable achievement. I considered it a pass-fail year, and anything you had to do to get through it—indulging inappropriate crushes, strictly temporary addictions, really bad TV—was an acceptable cost of psychological survival. Being “unable to deal” was a legitimate excuse for failing to answer emails, missing deadlines, or declining invitations. Everyone recognized that the situation was simply too much to be borne without occasionally going to pieces. This has, in fact, always been the case; we were just finally allowed to admit it.
May Books
The World In A Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age by Marco D'Eramo
Italian journalist Marco D'Eramo first sought to write a book about tourist cities, but quickly found himself writing about tourism in general. “We could quite plausibly term the current era ‘the Age of Tourism’ in the same way that we used to speak of the Age of Steel or the Age of Imperialism,” D'Eramo writes.
He makes a convincing case: tourism is woven into our lives, whether we live somewhere or work in an industry that relies on it, or if we participate in it as tourists. Today we can see the world in ways unfathomable to most people throughout history; before the Age of Tourism, only the wealthy traveled for pleasure.
D'Eramo takes particular issue with UNESCO: “UNESCO’s ‘World Heritage’ listing is the kiss of death,” he writes. “Once the label is affixed, the city’s life is snuffed out; it is ready for taxidermy.” Under the pretense of preservation, UNESCO transforms real places with real history into shallow tourist destinations, hollowing out any actual culture that existed there and replacing it with mindless itinerary-driven consumption. “This kind of preservation does not give us anything, it is a curing of the disease by killing the patient. Preserving a few stones is not equivalent to saving a city, an urban culture.”
D'Eramo wades a little too deep into the bogs of philosophy for my liking, spending more time applying Hegelian theory to the concept of tourism than I cared for. But it is not for no reason, and it culminates in a difficult question: is criticism of tourists inherently classist? “For the Right, the Other whom it is legitimate to hate is the immigrant; for the Left, racism against the Other manifests itself as the derision of tourists.”
The World In A Selfie will make you think new thoughts and question old ones, which makes it an enriching, if not challenging book to read.
Once again we stumble upon the immense underestimation of tourism, as if [Covid-19] were enough to undo a multidimensional, multisectoral phenomenon made possible only by two immense revolutions: a technological revolution in transport and communications that made travel shorter, safer, more comfortable and cheaper; and the social revolution that allowed increasing numbers of the world’s population to enjoy paid leisure time.
These two revolutions have in turn transformed the collective consciousness, revolutionizing common sentiments, the perception of the world, of distances, of otherness, the very concept of one’s own freedom. Undoing this pillar of the modern constitution is no small thing: one day or another it will happen, but it will certainly not be due to a simple virus. Our very relationship with the world, with space, with dimensions must change.
May Writing
For Civil Beat, I wrote about why we should charge visitors a cover charge, how sports can destroy us and how sports can heal us.