Book 'Em

OK, here's your cultural enlightenment for the day, a piece from the New York Times. The topic: Excessively positive book reviews. The diagnosis: they are, in fact, pretty stupid. I concur heartily, strongly, overwhelmingly, and so on and so forth.

In fact, I right now I could probably bang out a review of a book I'd never read and make it sound like your average review. I'm sitting in the library right now, so let me take a look at the nearest book. One moment, please...

OK, it's a real page-turned called "Hegel on the Arts." Here's what I'd write about it:

"Hegel On the Arts" is, without a doubt, the finest piece of pulped wood with letters inscribed upon it that has come across my desk in many a moon. When I first opened it I felt a chill race down my spine, and then back up it again. My spine did not lead me wrong.

I have read Shakespeare. I have read Dickens. I have read Faulkner and Goethe and Dante and all your other authors whose very names drip with praise poured on by centuries of critics. And I say to you they are crap! They are as nothing compared to "Hegel On the Arts."

This book changed my life, mostly for the better; and what it changed for the worse, I shall treasure even more, for even those changes were the product of "Hegel On the Arts." It was a revolution in my brain, one of the good kinds of revolution, not the one where the commoners end up oppressed, but the one that ends with the triumphant emergence of a new and glittering nation. Like America, hopefully.

In short...no, I cannot be short. I must stop completely. If I do not end this review here I will speak from now until doomsday about the perfection that is "Hegel On the Arts."

There you go. Wouldn't look out of place in the New York Review of Books, would it?

By the way, I read some of that Hegel book. It sucked.

Link via that hotbed of right-wing reaction, National Review's "The Corner."