Top critical review
14 people found this helpful
1.0 out of 5 starsIs it poetry or prose?
ByMalcolmon February 2, 2013
It's still a nightmare to read compared with the print version. Names of reviewers and authors are interchanged and corrupted (Bart Vanes for Bart van Es was particularly good). Sections of text from a review reappear embedded in the middle of a reader's letter several pages later. You can't identify quotations within reviews because the inverted commas have been omitted, so you sit there trying to work out which bits are the words of the reviewer and which are the words of the book being reviewed. Worse of all are the poems which TLS prints. Kindle removes the line boundaries and any other indicators of verse, so you can't easily tell verse from prose and you just have to keep reading the item again and again to see if it scans like verse. It all becomes a big intellectual challenge to make sense of it. I would have cancelled and resorted to TLS's own digital version, but getting a response from TLS was even more of an obstacle.