Hmmmmm - this comes for me under the heading of 'Yes is only meaningful if you can say no'. Or the necessary balance of salt/sour/sweet in cooking. Even if there were only positive reviews (and frankly, Tonstant Weader Fwows Up, even if I dissent from Ms Parker's reaction to A A Milne) they surely create a negative in their silence about the books they do not review ('If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all').

I've not-reviewed (as in, turned down the invitation to review) books in my field that I didn't think deserved the tribute of rational argument and reasoned refutation and to which I didn't want to draw more attention than they already had poured upon them. I also think getting codslappy with other works was a contribution to accurate scholarship.

I suppose one could just about advance a case that reviewing fiction involves matters of individual taste, but I'm not sure that flies. Because accentuating the positive, eliminating the negative: does that mean not drawing attention to e.g. inadequacies in depictions of race, gender, sex, disability, etc? This is a bit too much along the lines of those born-agains who are trying to burn Baby Bebop because someone in its pages uses bad pejorative words like 'fag' (I'm still reeling from the mental messiness and confusion that's going on there).

(I think this all might show up as an actual post on my own journal...)