Still More on The NY Time Top 25. I promise this is the last

On one hand I'm excited that people are still so passionate about books that such love can spark an arguments like this one. For my money, Song of Solomon is greater than Beloved, but what I find interesting is the belief shared by some bloggers that if one does not like a book personally, then there's no way other readers could find any merit in it. So there must be some other reason for the choice than the quality of the work, "affirmative action" for example (Their term, not mine).

This strikes me as arrogant. It reminds me a friend of mine who because he disliked grunge music assumed nobody else could possibly like it, so everybody was just trying to be cool by pretending.

Sometimes when book and reader fail to connect, the fault is the reader's not the book.