The Washington Post described the collection as "an absolute delight". Although the album was generally well received, its content drew criticism from fans, who felt the overall effect diminished the significance of Harrison's solo career. In the 1977 edition of their book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler summed up the implication: "George's 'Best Of'. Half Beatle, half Harisongs. But will there be a Volume II?" Nicholas Schaffner observed a couple of minor positives on this "half-baked" collection: "The Best of George Harrison does confirm that George's big production numbers from All Things Must Pass more than hold their own alongside the seven featured Beatles tunes ... And the album is undeniably better looking than Rock 'n' Roll Music." Bob Woffinden similarly found that Harrison's solo recordings matched the standard of the Beatles' tracks while noting that "Capitol's half-and-half arrangement ... made it look as though he was the only one of the four [former Beatles] with insufficient clout to warrant a 'Greatest Hits' entirely of his own work." In his 1981 book Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies, Robert Christgau said the first side of "impressive" Beatles songs nonetheless revealed how Harrison's "voice begins to betray its weaknesses after a while", and he deemed the solo side "remarkably shoddy". Retrospective assessment and legacy Reviewing the compilation for AllMusic in 2001, Bruce Eder described it as "a good but routine collection", while three years later Mac Randall wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide: "The Best of George Harrison takes half its contents from Beatles albums, which is a little insulting." In his April 2004 article on Harrison's solo releases, for Blender magazine, Paul Du Noyer said of the compilation: "Hard to fault so far as it goes and a good place to get the fine 1971 single 'Bangla Desh'." Although compromises to the hits-only formula had been permitted on the Lennon and Starr albums, AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine comments on the controversial choice of tracks: "But all this is down to a matter of timing and circumstance: Harrison needed to have a hits collection out in 1976, he didn't have enough big hits to fill out 13 tracks (even if he certainly had enough great album tracks to do so), and so the Fabs were brought in to fill in the cracks." Erlewine adds that "The result might be a little underwhelming