Occasionally, a reviewer’s wit makes it hard to distinguish between a bad book (unintentionally ridiculous) and a good book (self-consciously ridiculous). So, yes, we know Choire Sicha’s a good writer, but what I want to know is if JT Leroy isn’t. (I could read Leroy myself, but my shrink says I can cut my daily sessions down to weekly if I stop reading writers in my age group.)

From Sicha’s Washington Post review:

In Leroy’s bitty new novella, Harold’s End, a wary, hopeless boy named Oliver is plucked from San Francisco’s infamous Polk Street hustler huddle. Plumped up in the Castro district, in the home of an older man named Larry, he is given hamburgers, the best heroin available, and a pet snail named Harold [... intended for ...] an evening of non-negotiated scatological play.