Monday, September 05, 2005

The other Booker

If you read my review of Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots, please make sure to go back and look at the comments, including one from the author himself.

Mr Booker defends his opus in a manner which is more good-natured than might reasonably be expected, given the thumping I administered in the original review, and he has other defenders too.

Nothing for it, folks. You will just have to buy, borrow or steal the book and make up your own mind.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well he doesn't sound THAT good-natured to me. Probably about what I sound like when I get comments on my book... He has the right. I don’t begrudge him that. Books take a long time to write, but reviews only a few hours… still, everyone has the right to his opinion. Calling people grumpy old table bashing men who don’t know what they are talking about is…. Well… Not very nice…

Isn't humour allowed? Personally I would not read his book simply because I’ve read so many. If I see it on a shelf somewhere, I'll take a look, but when I read the title in the review my first thoughts were "not another one".

The concept is not new and in my younger days I bought loads of them. Do I need another? Would this book indeed have been published or reviewed by such star-writers if the author himself was not an "insider"?

archer said...

Any idiot can see that the rescue-the-princess plot to Mozart's Magic Flute is the same as the plot to the video game Super Mario Brothers. So what? It's the music that makes the difference.