What's with today, today?

A friend of mine who has spent many years reviewing books recently described book reviewing on her blog as necessarily and at essence a very subjective thing, and something which should be understood as such. So when, in a slightly fangirlish moment, I went looking for AS Byatt reviews and found one that was lukewarm, I had to laugh at myself for getting angry. They were a reviewer, they were communicating their experience, not everyone likes AS Byatt, etc. The review was all about how the reviewer had disliked Byatt but liked Possession , so it was actually quite positive. But since Possession is one of my favourite books I still felt slighted. Especially by the comments. The first one was by a man who was apparently knowledgable about Victorian poetry, and he called her poetry 'inauthentic'. I didn't read the comments for long, becuase they made me upset. Becuase I thought the poetry captured something about Victorian poetry, it's allusiveness particularly. But then ...

I'm very excited because there is a new AS Byatt out! It's called The Children's Book, have justed started reading it and will report back later. In other news, something that I would recommend checking out at the moment is Triple J's Hottest 100 of all time which can be found here in list format, and on the radio over the weekend if you want to listen to them count down. The top 20 are being revealed on Sunday. Hearing the ads for this on the radio, asking listeners to vote, I was incredibly dubious of the idea. How can you create something that tries to be so definitive? Reading the list however, I am sold. Not so much because I think they have actually managed to find the hottest 100 songs of all time, but because I think the execution is pretty impressive. The concept is designed to celebrate 20 years of Triple J, playing on their annual Hottest 100 countdown. I'm relatively impressed with the range so far- there are quite a few decades represented, and we have...