Some critics are a little to full of themselves

I was going through my RSS feeds this morning and saw a review for "The Headmaster's Dilemma". I thought I had seen the book at Border's the other day so I gave the review a quick read (mistake I was thinking of "The Headmaster Ritual"). The book doesn't sound like anything I would really be interested in but what really got me was the snobby attitude of the reviewer Carolyn See:

There is a great deal of talk in publishing now about whether this or that book might or might not sell well to book groups, those mighty gatherings of hitherto unidentified women who yearn for cultural insights and perhaps a respite from loneliness. Books picked for discussion are often novels about middle-class women with unfaithful husbands or women who have affairs, or they are memoirs of middle-class childhoods, wayward parents, wayward children and life-threatening diseases as they are experienced by the middle class. But -- as every cat burglar knows -- people tend to look around, but they almost never look up. Instead of reading about themselves, book groups might be well advised to read about how the one-tenth of 1 percent, "the eastern seaboard upper class," spends its own sweet time.

Ya know there may well be a lot of talk about whether books will be popular with book clubs, but that's because publishing is a profit driven business. By extension so is Ms. See. She should consider treating her consumer with a little more respect.

books