Reviewing with authority

One of the good things about being totally oblivious to the rest of the blogging world is that I'm blissfully unaware every time there's a blow-up about some aspect of book blogging.

I like being in my little bubble.

But if people are questioning bloggers' authority to write reviews, or whatever, then I feel inclined to call them a few names. Just you try to question MY authority.

I have the authority to write about books I've read. I'm a reader. Books are for readers and anyone who says differently is selling something.

I respond to the text honestly, with all the heart, experience and knowledge that I've acquired in 32 years. I bring to the text every part of who I am.

I meet the story somewhere in the nether world that is a combination of the world created by the author and the world I inhabit. A different reader will meet the story in a different place. There is no objective reading, because we are never outside ourselves.

I have the authority to write reviews, if I want to. A review is my considered response. I can evaluate, criticize, praise, mock, quote, and analyze to my heart's content.

I will never write an objective sentence in my life. I have no desire to. If book reviewing is not about a human response to a human text, by which I mean emotions are involved, then what use is it? I wouldn't like to know what a robot thought of Middlemarch.

Literature is art. And it is meant for us.

I have a graduate degree in English (which, by the way, is not at all required to be a good reader) and there is nothing that I learned in all those years of studying Literature with a capital 'L' that suggests any different. If I learned one thing in graduate school, it's this:

scholarly discourse = arguing, arguing, arguing

So don't you go around thinking for a single minute that there is one official interpretation of anything.

You are entitled to your own opinion and everyone else is entitled to theirs. Some evaluations of a work of literature may be more deeply considered, fully engaged, or well written than others. That still doesn't make them right.

No one has a monopoly on the interpretation, understanding, or enjoyment of literature. Anyone who thinks they do can kiss my royal diasticutis.