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Title: I guess it sounded like a good idea
Review: Criticism is most useful when you're familiar enough with the critic to know what the critic's standards are; if you're familiar enough with the critic's sensibility, you can measure his or her judgements against your own, and so know what to accept and what to ignore. In other volumes of this type (David Pringle's "Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels" for example), even if you don't know the critic to start with, because every judgement of every book is his, as you work through the book you come to know him, his likes and dislikes, his insights and blind spots, his preferences and prejudices. In this book, however, this is impossible, because the 100 books have been chosen by 100 different authors. It must have sounded like a good idea, but it makes for something of a mess, and I've found the book to be of far less use than Pringle's books on science fiction and fantasy, or the fantasy compilation by James Cawthorne and Michael Moorcock.
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