In the latest episode of the Coode Street Podcast (which I will now forever think of as the Poode Street Codcast) Gary Wolfe quotes an unnamed publishing insider as follows:

“An objective review is not a review, it’s a report”

Yes.

As Jonathan notes in the podcast, reading is an intensely subjective experience. As a reviewer, all you can say is how the book read to you. Naturally we all think we are right, then we talk to other people and discover how differently people can read the same book.

All reviewers are, of course, gatekeepers, in that we tell our readers which books we think are worth reading, and which we think are not. But that is only what we think, and to a great extent our value as reviewers is in explaining why we think those things, not in the validity of our judgments. I am deeply suspicious of any reviewer who appears to want to be an “authority”.