In Defence of the White Middle-class Middle-aged Male Reviewer

The Guardian currently seems to be embarking on more crusades to save literature than Salman Rushdie’s Twitter account. Last week’s post by blogger Sam Jordison was no exception. He asked whether book reviews are “bland, boring and formulaic”. Fresh from judging Not the Booker (a Guardian online award designed to champion independent publishers and celebrate the vox blogerati), he should really have had something interesting to say.

Instead Jordison committed many of the sins which crop up in book reviews. He offered a couple of cute observations, hesitated a few suggestions, registered bemusement and skilfully evaded reaching any kind of conclusion with a hexacolonic crescendo of rhetorical questions (as painful as it sounds).

When it came to analysing why people might find reviews boring, he proffered two old chestnuts and tentatively prodded them as if they might still be hot from the raging debate.