A recent poll of 364 book reviewers reveals that 76% of surveyed critics feel that if you haven’t read a work cover to cover you shouldn’t be critiquing it in print.

So that leaves about 87 book reviewers to review How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read without actually having read it.

Yes!

I think Pierre Baynard’s book is a brilliant idea and I intend to read it promptly, surely realizing that I have been successfully employing all of Baynard’s techniques since middle school. So I’m not sure what to think of the recent book reviewers ethics poll. But I do know that Hunter S. Thompson once said that “Morality is Temporary. Wisdom is Permanent.” Instead of morality, I think the same could be said of ethics.

The ethics poll certainly reflects a necessary PRINT standard in this Time of Technology rife as it is with amateurs and ignorance. Baynard’s book is about TALKING and therefore exempt. We all have the right to pretend and posture and pose at parties in front of friends we like and enemies we are seeking to trump. That is something no ethics poll will ever take away from us.

Indeed.

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