Well I’m always telling people, in my annoying way, that ‘negative’ doesn’t mean bad or critical or disapproving or pessimistic or skeptical or cynical or hostile. That if you want to call something any of those, you should use those words, and not the word ‘negative’ which 1. doesn’t mean any of those and 2. if you do use it as a pointless euphemism for those other words is vague and woolly and non-specific and confusing. By the same token ‘positive’ doesn’t mean approving or friendly or optimistic or patriotic or cheerful or warm or helpful. There’s a bizarre kind of covert thought-control going on in the translation of all words conveying disagreement and dissent into ‘negative’ and all words … Read the rest

Oh really, what crap. It’s only snobs and supercilious critics who think bad novels are bad novels. Excuse me, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a bad novel is just a bad novel.

Trollope, whose restrained prose is as elegant as the lady herself, poured haughty scorn on the pretensions of the literary genre, and in particular the “grim lit” the critics seem to adore “that makes you want to slash your wrists”.

Well that’s wrong for a start. ‘Restrained’ prose? Well sure, I suppose. That’s one way to describe it. One might say the same of a train timetable, or a laundry list, or a tax code. That couldn’t be a nice evasive way of … Read the rest

But then, the person who wrote that article concluded it with this bit of wisdom by way of her nomination for the 100 Worst Books list:

To kick off, mine is Wuthering Heights – it has all the emotional depth of sixth-form poetry and I feel an intense desire to give all the characters a good slap and tell them to stop being so self-indulgent. Mysteriously, it’s considered a landmark of English literature by many people whose judgment I usually admire.

So clearly I shouldn’t be surprised if she uses words in a silly way. In fact I should be surprised that she’s writing for a major newspaper, that’s what I should be surprised at.… Read the rest