It’s a sad fact of life that the most entertaining reviews are the ones that are highly critical of the thing being reviewed. I don’t mean that every critical review is highly entertaining. It’s more a case of observing that if a review makes you laugh out loud, it’s far more likely to be one that tears the thing to shreds.

I could give several detailed examples, but frankly I don’t wish to be sued for libel. But you can verify this for yourself. The reviews in The Critic tend to be especially acerbic, and therefore funny.

I quite like this, for example:

I suspect the reason is that there are only so many ways of saying that a book is brilliant. One way actually, unless you try “Splendid”. (If you read that a book is “compelling”, you can’t take that as praise. It may be compelling in the same way that some TV soap operas are rivetting: because they are so bad they are good. Or it could mean that the reviewer is bone idle. See the quote below.)

Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to be original if you’re giving fulsome praise. Whatever the reason, I am attempting to avoid dullness when I think something is good. I hope I even manage to make such reviews worthy of at least a smile if not a guffaw.

For example, in my review of a a science fiction course I wrote:

In a recent review of Teaching Machines by Audrey Watters I wrote:

That review was highly positive, which could have been pretty tedious to read, which is why I voiced my views about an area covered by the author.