the NYTBR once again, with feeling

Here’s another blog entry, this one from Blowhards, about the on-going fuss at the New York Times Book Review. Beware: it is very long, but also refreshing in its candid request for some perspective. One paragraph that made me smile because I agree with every word :

* I wish more people didn’t care. The Book Review Section, like the Times generally, matters to the extent we let it matter. Might we not be better off letting go our fixation on it? Do you find it as strange as I do how seriously many people take the section — as though it were some revered public trust? It’s a very professional review of books, but I find reading it like being stuck back in some nightmare English class where everyone’s smart and eager — the antithesis of why I bother with books in the first place.