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Kathleen McCook's avatar

NO BANALITY allowed.

"The Complete Review" website (now 20 years+) is a one man show (M.A.Orthofer). It has thousands of reviews, often translations, and his editorial policy is the best:

"The complete review makes no claims whatsoever to any form of objectivity in its reviews and opinions. We acknowledge that the biases and personal views of the editors colour all aspects of this site."

https://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html

"Nevertheless, we go to great lengths to make users of this site aware of other opinions, and to provide them with links to these -- although we reserve the right not to link to a site or page if we deem the information provided irrelevant, uninformed, uninformative, banal, available elsewhere, or it just plain does not suit us."

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RC's avatar

I find most of your posts interesting and thought provoking, but the book reviews and literature posts have been my favorites and the reason why I became a paid subscriber. Modern book culture is sucking the joy out of books. The reviews in mainstream publications, the sites like Good Reads, and the online book discussion groups and clubs that should be a refuge for people who are curious and love discussing ideas and language and who love good stories are in reality nothing more than yet another place to project a personal brand and judge other people. None of the people in this culture seems to love books! They only want to distill down precisely what/who the book represents in the context of our current political culture and either joylessly accept it as worthy of being read or declare it harmful. I love reading reviews with which I disagree, but I dislike reading reviews from people who don’t actually love or even like the books they give rave reviews to, or possibly don’t trust or love books at all. I am definitely looking forward to lit week.

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