Why You Should Not Read Book Reviews in the New York Times, Reason #1,694: The opening paragraph of Glen Duncan's review of Zone One, by Colson Whitehead:

A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? Granted the intellectual’s hit hanky-panky pay dirt, but what’s in it for the porn star? Conversation? Ideas? Deconstruction?

Let's parse this a little bit. Not only is it offensive from a sex worker perspective—Of course a porn star would never be interested in intellectual pursuits! Porn stars are idiots who are only interested in fucking!—it's also offensive from a literary perspective. I thought we'd finally done away with the tired old snobbish idea that "real" writers are literary writers, and that genre fiction is not "real" fiction. The review goes on to condescend to horror fans:

Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, “Zone One,” features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar. He has my sympathy. I can see the disgruntled reviews on Amazon already: “I don’t get it. This book’s supposed to be about zombies, but the author spends pages and pages talking about all this other stuff I’m not interested in.”

Let me put this as plainly as I possibly can: This horrible shit is why people don't read book reviews anymore. This snobby tut-tutting is from a different age, when literary cliques slavishly defended the ivory towers of academia with the wrong-headed concept that there is only one proper way to read a book, and that a novel is an encoded message from the author that can only be deciphered with the help of people who have trained for their whole lives in the monkish pursuit of literary criticism. Even though Duncan gives the porn star/intellectual couple his blessing at the end of his review—who knew that a great author could write a great book using childish pursuits like horror fiction?—the smugness and condescension of this review gives me yet another reason to never, ever pick up the New York Times Book Review. (My review of Zone One, if you're interested, is right here.) This argument was settled years ago, and pricks like Duncan lost.