"There is a reason that critics did stop making “is this great?” the first and last question of literary analysis (Edmundson is not wrong to say that this problem has been sidelined in cultural criticism, and this does indeed raise problems, as the concept of good and bad work is indispensible). The reason is that it’s a really hard philosophical problem that was made to seem easier through slight-of-hand when the answer was conflated with the preferences and tastes of a fairly narrow social class that held itself aloof from a wider public... I’d welcome an investigation of what makes some cultural works great and others ordinary or bad that was consciously intended to provide a critical toolkit to other readers and critics. ... Not a canon, but the foundation for making a canon...." - A canon foundry, as it were.

"The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it. The advantage of this is exactly the same as the advantage of thinking of one’s once-beloved ex as having been eaten by a zombie, who is now shambling around using the name and body of the former person. It lets one keep one’s original love clear of the later betrayals."