I found a website that collects each year’s most scathing book reviews, and it’s very helpful. Any book that departs from the left-wing dogma of the past two seconds gets torn to shreds. I found a list of books that are potential good reads there.
I found a website that collects each year’s most scathing book reviews, and it’s very helpful. Any book that departs from the left-wing dogma of the past two seconds gets torn to shreds. I found a list of books that are potential good reads there.
I struggled to get through even just the excerpts of these reviews. And these are people who are paid to write them. If you want to demolish a book in a review, there a ways to do that in a clear, informative and funny way. These reviews, however, are word soup. Their authors really need to read Strunk and White.
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Freud would have made a lot of them.
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It’s incredible when done by a genius like Rafael Chirbes. And absolutely horrid when done by anybody else. Many people think they have a personality deep enough to rummage in publicly but it’s almost never true. As a result, such books have a tendency to sound like a claustrophobic and endless Instagram feed.
I couldn’t have said it any better. This is exactly what it is.
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There needs to be an umbrella term for people who emote professionally, and for the action of professional emoting– actors, some writers, talk show hosts, a subset of journalists– it’s icky, like sex work but less honest. I would prefer if we had some kind of very stylized kabuki-type ritual emoting to take the place of all of it– you know, we are now presenting a sad news story, so the newsanchors all pull out their papier-mache sad masks from under the desk. It’d be less… grubby and manipulative.
What should we call them? People who wring their emotions and maneuver others’ feelings for money in a gross, cynical way? Emotorists? Tear Jockeys? Public Criers? Performative Feelers? Sensitive Plants?
It could work.
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