Letters to the Editor
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Shame on Salon
I read Salon because I respect your articles and writers. Even though you posted a disclaimer I now hold a different opinion of you as sleazy. What is wrong with being a leader in journalism? Respecting the writer of the book that you are reviewing. Shame, shame, shame.
I have lost respect for you entirely.
E. McGill
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Christopher1988
You write: "For most of the history of criticism, critics have felt it was important, if you're going to evaluate a work, to evaluate the whole thing. CRITICISM ISN'T ADVERTISEMENT!"
Most critics have also sought to differentiate between criticism and For the former to work, the critic does indeed need to assume that his or her audience knows the work whole. That is, I cannot talk seriously with you about "Signifiers of Innocence in Citizen Kane" unless you happen to know what Rosebud is.
But reviewers (i.e, not critics) have always played a little game: You give your audience enough to work with, but you don't spoil the surprises. True, once enough time has passed, you can go right ahead and assume that your audience, if it is made up of sentient, culturally-aware people, must have happened upon the secret even if they have not, in fact, encountered the text. So I don't feel all that bad about telling you that Bruce Willis is dead, Verbal is Keyser Soze, and, as Mayor Quimby so eloquently put it re: The Crying Game, "the chick's a guy, the chick's a guy."
I don't think enough time has passed between the publication of the Harry Potter novel and the publication of the Salon review because--well, because the book has not yet been published.
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It really doesn't matter
My husband rereads The Lord of the Rings every year; I've read it about six times since I first got it in 1965. We both enjoy, anticipate, yearn for certain scenes each time we read it: Tom Bombadil is coming! Merry and Pippin are about to meet Treebeard!
I find myself rereading the novels of Jane Austen on a regular basis, too. All the way through Pride and Prejudice I look forward to Eliza confronting Lady Catherine in the garden.
And yet I remember once looking for a new book that would really enchant me, and thinking "I want to read The Lord of the Rings for the first time...."
There's magic in the first reading of a book, but there's even more magic in knowing it's there to be enjoyed again and again.
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Christopher1988 again
You write: "People have existed for nearly two centuries enjoying works despite knowing what was coming up. Indeed, they stood on the decks of New York, crying out to the shipmen bringing the next installment of Great Expectations, "Does Little Nell live?" They were begging for spoilers for a book they all intended to devour."
Wrong book for Little Nell, dude.
Also, your argument is weakened by your limited knowledge of literary history. Readers (or, more likely, listeners) knew exactly what was going to happen in The Iliad, which appeared a couple of years before your area of coverage.
Rowling is not Homer, nor is she Dickens. (Nor is she Hitchcock or Welles.) She is the author of "sturdy" pop fictions, writing for an audience that cares not one whit for her prose stylings. She's writing junk literature, and hooray for her. And one of the pleasures of junk lit is its ability to surprise.
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Of course, there are readers more interested in this than in the war in Iraq
Just as there are hundreds for whom Audio File was important--maybe not so much as a music resource as a symbol of what Salon was and, to some of us, is still supposed to be: a magazine that treats culture (which includes politics, of course, but also the ARTS) seriously.
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Arsene
Most grownups can also put up with reading the words fuck and shit. What made you go out of your way, in a letter about not babying adults, to baby adults?
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janinedm
I am not anonymous reviewer person; I am this anonymous reviewer person. Thanks for slapping him around a bit. I, too, have been paid real American money for writing about books and music and movies, though the best payment I ever received was a box of cookies. Mmmm: chocolate chip.
You might also have mentioned how his bizarre Latinate vocabulary mixes with a tin ear to produce really dreadful prose. In the next-to-last ("penultimate") paragraph, he writes, "As a cultural phenomenon, this is a common problem," failing to hear the cacophony, following that up with the even worse "fundamental futility of criticism in the face of the cultural wave"--too many prepositional phrases and alliteration that would have rocked the Anglo-Saxon's world but not ours.
Feh.
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Shouldnt have spoiled the ending...
I didnt mind learning about parts of the book, but to flat out give the ending of the book about how Harry will live and marry and have kids, I think is rediculus. That one frodo line alone ruined the whole book, one big mystery about the book was whether he would live or die, you spoiled it completly. Every time we read about him in a big fight, mainly the last fight, we all know he will survive. He its really pathetic that you felt you had to do this, this wasnt even a review it was a just something you could use to prove that you knew the ending, you are no better than the people online who spoil the book or the crappy new york times. I also agree with an above statement that says a spoiler in a review is supposed to give plot points, not actually spoil the book, you need to change the editing caption to read that the whole ending is spoiled...
Also in doing what you did, you have lost a fan of this site who will never return!
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I appreciate the fairly delicate spoilers
I've got an 11 year old, highly sensitive daughter who got a ticket to get a book at midnight tonight--and she doesn't want to read it before I do, so she can decide if it's "safe." I don't have time to do that this weekend, for heaven's sake! But she's still traumatized over Dumbledore dying in book 6, and wants to be sure it'll be 'ok' to read this book. So really, the sole major spoiler is that the worst-case ending wasn't what happened--so? It is a kid's book; that worst case ending would have been an unconscionable decision to make on Rowling's part. And with the review, I can at least reassure my daughter that yes, there will be pain involved, but it shouldn't be so agonizing that she can't stand it.
But if you want to know nothing about the book beforehand, there's such an easy solution. When I see reviews here of Battlestar Galactica episodes that I've TiVo'd but not seen yet, I just don't read the reviews until I see the show. But knowing where to turn after I have seen the show and want more, more, more--that's been great.
Make a mental note that there's a review, go get the book tonight, and when sometime Sunday you're blearly desperate for someone to talk to about the book, the review is here waiting. And if you read fast enough that it's actually sometime Saturday, that's fine too.