Literary Significance and Reception
This novel was a departure for author John Connolly, whose other novels belong to the thriller and crime genres. Graham Joyce of the Washington Post reviewed the novel as a "distracting outing for the author". Other critics had similar views of the novel as possessing unrealistic conventions and disturbing elements.
Read more about this topic: The Book Of Lost Things
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as “spectacles” to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions.... The learned are mere literary drudges.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)