Reviewers of all sorts – from those in Kirkus and The New York Times to those offering their opinions on their blogs or on Goodreads or Amazon – generally attempt to assess authors according to their standards. And that’s really what reviews are all about.

What tends to get overlooked, if not positively ignored, is that there ought to be reviews about readers as well. Because, just as authors differ, so do readers, and what pleases one reader can often infuriate another. And, just because I’m feeling contrary, I’ll offer some reviews of the types of readers I’ve observed over the last forty years or so, although you shouldn’t attribute too much meaning to the order in which I’m presenting these reader semi-stereotypes, even if they’re only my stereotypes.

I’ll begin with every author’s favorite type of reader – the enthusiasts. They like reading and books, and many especially like a particular genre or subgenre of fiction, and some are only wildly enthusiastic about a given author. Authors who have large numbers of enthusiasts are fortunate indeed, although often enthusiasts can be very reticent to admit their enthusiasms, which can leave some authors bewildered – as I was for years – because such authors sell books but can find very few people who admit to buying them.

Other types of readers are a more mixed bag, such as the literalist purists, for whom three typos in book provide discomfort, and more than that occasion physical pain, who also often have difficulty with authors who employ words in ways that require knowledge of more than the first dictionary definition, and who are outraged if the author portraying a low-tech culture uses a different weight for a stone’s worth of merchandise [despite the fact that there were different “stone-weights” for different commodities until the nineteenth century].

Following the literalist purists come the one-gender readers. They’re usually but not exclusively male and have virtually no interest in or possibly no ability to identify with a protagonist of the opposite gender, let alone protagonists with complex genders.

I’ve also noted in the past that there are readers who seem to believe that literary romance cannot be complete without copious and explicit sexual encounters. Call them the over-sexed romantics, as opposed to the prudish romantics for whom the merest direct implication of sexual encounters sends them for the literary equivalent of smelling salts.

For the stylistics, the words themselves offer the greatest satisfaction, so much so that often the plot or what passes for one is merely a bothersome necessity, some of whom prone to gush over or luxuriate in the work of Mervyn Peake or Gene Wolfe.

The secret violence lovers are those readers who find all manner of means to praise books of dubious quality so that they can deceive themselves into believing the books they enjoy are better than they are, rather than accepting the fact that they personally have a touch of the voyeuristic sadist in themselves and really like all that violence and rough, if not vicious, sex. Those who have a touch of the stylist get double pleasure out of Game of Thrones.

The gourmet bibliophiles comprise one of the smallest groups of readers, those who want excellence in every aspect of what they read, and who are actually intelligent enough to know what excellence is and well-read enough to discriminate between the merely popular, the flavor-de-jour books of the pseudo-literati, and the books of depth. Unfortunately, they’re usually disappointed, given how rare excellence is, and how often literary flash is taken for depth.

Then there are the fictional gourmets, for whom plot is a device to carry them from fictional meal to fictional meal, and I suspect a number of them read my novels, particularly the “Ghost” books.

In stark contrast to the gourmet bibliophile and the stylist is the minimalist – otherwise known as the slam-bam-thank-you-sir-or-ma’am type. They go straight to the story, like a famished wolf to bloody meat. This kind of reader demands only the bare-bones story, and forget about metaphor, allusion, or anything requiring diversion from the pursuit to the bloody, sexual, or explosive end, and if a book doesn’t have one of those, for them, it’s not worth reading.

Then we’ve also seen the recent rise of the genderists, for whom no book is satisfying except those that explore in depth beyond that of the Challenger Deep the role, identify, function, malfunction, dysfunction, optimal theoretical function, including all other ancillary functions, of all possible genders and permutations thereof, preferably in overstated understatement.

More and more in the realm of speculative fiction, we’re seeing the immersers, or the compleatists, those who not so much read a given series, but would prefer to live and spend their entire existence in just the world of that series. And yes, I’ve given them a series just like that in the Saga of Recluce.

Related to the gourmet bibliophiles are the cogitators, the thinkers who get great pleasure in books so deep that they can find additional twists and meanings on re-read after re-read and who find what the minimalists insist upon is akin to reading primers or simplistic graphic novels.

Now… I’ve probably missed type or two of reader, and most likely many readers have characteristics of several types, but since readers are always rating writers, I thought it was only fair for a writer to review readers, turn about being fair play, so to speak.

One of the ever-increasing problems created by technology – and especially the internet and cellphones – is a failure, particularly by the younger generations, to understand that waiting until the last moment can be a problem, sometimes even a disaster. I’m perfectly well aware that procrastination has been a fault in every “younger” generation since before the time of Plato, but from what I’m observing, that particular fault seems to be lasting longer among the young and spreading to a greater segment of the population.

Part of the reason for this, I’m personally convinced, is because of the “instant” nature of communications. Especially in the high-tech world, one can reach people immediately, and more and more businesses are expecting their employees to be available electronically all the time. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this has some considerable downsides, but one of those downsides I haven’t mentioned in any depth is that such communications expectations lead to other expectations, particularly that physical products and goods can be available equally swiftly.

In this regard, Amazon has also been fostering unrealistic expectations. It’s one thing to be able to pack and ship an existing product in less than twenty-four hours; it’s something entirely different to be able to create something unique in the same period, or to write a detailed analysis about something new, with which the analyst has had no experience, in the same period. In short, doing the work actually takes far more time than one-day shipping the product, or electronically zapping an analysis to whoever needs it.

My wife the professor sees this all the time. Students think that they can learn a piece of complex music overnight or at least in a few days. They think they can write papers overnight… and they indeed can, except that such papers seldom make sense because they simply throw things together because they haven’t spent time doing the background study necessary.

Then there’s the associated problem. All this technology that we use today has a far higher failure rate than the old-fashioned manual typewriter did…and when that’s combined with waiting until the last moment… is it really anyone else’s fault when your hard drive fails at four in the morning because you put everything off? Is it anyone else’s fault if the internet goes down for the two hours just before the deadline for acceptance of the paper, project, grant application, or whatever? Or that the color printer runs out of toner and the office supply store won’t be open until nine o’clock?

This just doesn’t happen to students. Boeing screwed up the production of its new 787 because the company decided to outsource manufacturing and relied on “just in time” delivery. It became such a disaster that Boeing had to build more facilities to manufacture certain key components. The “instant” aspects of technology aren’t infallible, and they’re only part of the process, and everything requires lead time and planning – something that all too many people from students even to engineers seem to be forgetting.

On a recent trip, I read a book by an author I’ve known, on and off, for more than twenty years, a book that had gotten good reviews from a publication that seldom gives them. I’d never read the author’s work, but others I know have and thought highly of it. So I read the book.

The first thing I’ll say is that it was extraordinarily well-written. The language, the sentence structure, the revelations about the main character, the pacing… and I had to force myself to finish the work, although I did.

Why did I have such trouble reading to the end? Because it was about an extremely gifted and creative artist, who was intelligent and perceptive, often empathetic, and sometimes kind… yet also arrogantly and persistently self-destructive in pursuit of greater and greater “shock value” in the name of artistic creativity. The writer portrayed the protagonist brilliantly, and in a fashion that left little doubt about the writer’s understanding of the protagonist’s struggles, faults, and failures in dealing with the world, but primarily in dealing with other largely self-destructive and arrogant individuals. The book ends on a single upbeat note… with the absolute implication that the struggles, failures, and self-destructive behavior will continue past that momentary resolution and single grace note of happiness.

In some ways, it’s almost a masterpiece, and in some readers’ minds it likely is. It’s certainly true to life, because I’ve not only read about such self-destructive behavior, but I’ve also seen it and known individuals like that, particularly creative ones. I’ve also seen far too many painters, film-makers, writers, photographers, sculptors, musicians, and others attempt to perpetuate shock value for the sake of shock value while touting it as creativity. The book certainly raises the question of whether creativity and self-destruction are the two faces of the same coin, as well as the suggestion that there’s a darkness beneath the font of creativity, and to that last possibility I’d have to agree. With what I don’t agree is the near-absolute correlation the author suggested between extreme creativity, shock value, and self-destructive behavior, although there’s little doubt in my mind that there have been and likely always will be those highly creative individuals who are also highly self-destructive.

In the end, I could barely finish the book simply because I find that self-destructive behavior, and shock value for the sake of shock value by creative individuals is a waste of human potential and talent, perhaps a tragedy in the case of those who cannot help themselves, but all too often a failure to accept the fact that creativity is almost never fully appreciated by the majority of the human species and almost invariably is ranked well behind material sustenance and personal power, regardless of the greatness and excellence of that creativity… or the toll taken on those who create.

A book that portrays creativity as the path to self-destruction and near nihilism certainly represents one possible life-path, especially today, when the public value of any artist is measured primarily by the cashbox, and when all too often the excesses of shock value are highly rewarded. I just can’t praise a book so depressing, or find a character that unwilling or unable to turn away from the darkness worth either a mention by name or a read of subsequent adventures. Creating is hard enough and good creators scarce enough that reading about those who cannot deal with the pressures and the challenges of their own abilities [and turn to the dark side, if you will] is the last thing I want to read about. But sometimes, it takes just such a book to remind me of that.

We all have expectations, pretty much about everything, and from what I can tell, that’s the “normal” condition for human beings. We also have a tendency to rate, judge, or assess much of life and its components by how well those people, items, products, books, movies, and even the weather meet our expectations. That’s also normal.

The problem with that “normal” behavior, however, is that our assessments, and thus, our expectations, may not be especially accurate or in accord with the expectations of others. If we’re reasonably accurate in our assessments, and so are all those with whom we associate, few are likely to question us, and those questions are easily dismissed.

But what if our assessments are not all that accurate, and we’re in agreement with most of those with whom we associate? The general reaction, from what I’ve observed, is, again, to dismiss contrary opinions as inaccurate and unfounded, and to re-affirm bonds with those with whom we associate. Sometimes those dismissals even take the form of “I expected better of….”

But when time and events demonstrate absolutely that certain expectations were wrong, how many people ever admit that past assessments and expectations were in fact inaccurate.

Again, from what I’ve observed… very few. Reactions range from denying that one ever had that opinion to denying that the facts and events even existed. Today, the Turkish government is busily denying that millions of Armenians were killed about a century ago, despite a wealth of absolute evidence. Millions of Christian believers deny evolution and some even deny the age of the universe, again, despite a massive amount of rather substantial evidence.

I do wonder what the rabid supporters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will say when it becomes factually obvious that what those two promise cannot and will not be accomplished. Will they claim they were deceived by their expectations? Or will they blame the candidates? Or blame those of us who never had any positive expectation that they would accomplish political miracles? Or will they say, “I expected better…”

…might just as well be called dominance management, because conflict usually arises when two parties can’t agree with each other. The most likely results are: (1) one party gives in rather than deal with the conflict; (2) one party forces the other to give in through greater force of some sort, physical strength, financial strength, political strength, strength of personality, sheer endurance, some combination of those, or the threat of those; (3) compromise of some sort; or (4) total disengagement, which can range from polite and cordial agreement to disagree to absolute and continued hostility, either concealed or overt.

Most people, I’ve discovered, don’t think of conflicts in that way, but from what I’ve observed that’s the spectrum of responses to ideological, political, financial, or physical conflicts.

What complicates such conflicts is usually, but not always, the assumption by one or both of the parties of some form of superiority, either moral, intellectual, or physical, which can make any form of real agreement difficult. And when one party is forced to agree to or to accept the terms of the other party, the result is almost inevitably anger and resentment, particularly when the party forced to agree believes fervently in his or her moral or intellectual superiority, which is all too often the case, or that they’ve been wronged in some fashion.

That also means when someone is coerced/forced into agreement against their will, such agreement will only last so long as the “superior” party can enforce their will.

All of which is a reason why the United States eventually “loses” wars and conflicts in places like Vietnam and the Middle East, because we don’t want to pay the price for continuing to enforce our desires on others, which is what is necessary when the belief structure of the majority of the people of a country is at odds with our belief structure. In places where we have “won,” it has taken generations of occupation to shift belief structures, and, in the case of our own southern states of the Confederacy, one could make the case that even 150 years later, those “old south” belief structures still persist in a large number of people.

That doesn’t mean the United States can always avoid using force, but if we don’t want to spend or bleed ourselves dry, most use of force should be restricted to simply stopping the worst of what we can stop, without attempting to force ideological/political change on other cultures.

On the domestic front, we’ll also end up locked in an exhausting and debilitating deadlock unless we return to the basics of the “civil society” envisioned by the Founding Fathers, that is, a society based on a compromise over what should be legal and what should not be, because with more than a fifth of the country now identifying themselves as non-religious, and with very differing core beliefs between evangelicals and other faiths, any attempt to impose religion-based strictures on the entire population will only fuel more conflict… and that’s the last thing any of us need in these troubling times.