Hatchet Job of the Day

This doesn’t quite count as a hatchet job, but Keith Miller’s cool assessment in the Telegraph of William Boyd’s writing isn’t exactly flattering:

I’m often reminded of Kipling’s words when I hear books being described as “reads”. The term is meant to suggest a certain frictionless pleasure; it is offered up in apparently unalloyed praise for a book’s sleek marketability. But it sounds oddly discourteous to me, like the Irish locution “ride” to denote an attractive person of the opposite sex. And can you really have pleasure without a bit of friction? Don’t we want the books we read to rub off a little in the reading, to leave some spoor or spraint of memory or disquiet behind?

William Boyd writes “reads”. He is also widely praised as a “master storyteller”, as if there were some Storyteller’s Guild still up and running somewhere in the City and he’d spent the requisite decade apprenticed to it.

Read all reviews for WAITING FOR SUNRISE.

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