Read Like a Writer: What AK Blakemore's Candid Book Verdicts Teach Students

Writers do not read by consensus; they read like a writer, asking what each book does to them and why. A Guardian books interview published on 9 October with the poet and novelist AK Blakemore shows the habit in action: she calls Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch "extremely silly and bad", praises a F Scott Fitzgerald novel she considers perfect, and describes losing faith in Ernest Hemingway. None of these verdicts defers to reputation; they are the kind of positions a writer is expected to argue. This article turns that candour into a method students can practise: forming independent judgments, defending them with evidence, and letting them sharpen your own voice.

A Poet Who Says What She Thinks

The Guardian's books desk interviewed AK Blakemore, the poet and novelist whose second book is The Glutton, for a feature published on 9 October 2026. Its headline quotes her verdict on Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch: "extremely silly and bad". The standfirst adds that she discusses F Scott Fitzgerald's "perfect novel" and "losing faith in Ernest Hemingway", plus a recent debut that impressed her. The excerpt we can see covers her earliest reading: Lynley Dodd's Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy, whose rhythms she says she could still recite, and picture books illustrated by Korky Paul. Treat the fuller verdicts as flagged rather than fully quoted here; the point survives either way, because a working writer is publicly naming books she admires and books she rejects.

That public naming matters more than any single verdict. Students are surrounded by ranked lists, prize shortlists and set texts that arrive pre-approved, so the easiest habit is deference: liking what reputable people liked. Blakemore's interview models the opposite reflex, one that costs something. Saying a famous, widely assigned novel is silly is a claim you own, and owning claims is exactly the muscle student writers undertrain. You do not need to agree with her about Tartt, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, and the sources here do not settle those arguments. You need to notice that a practising poet treats reputation as evidence to weigh, not as a verdict to copy, and that this stance is available to you on every page you read.

Reading Like a Writer Means Judging the Machinery

There is a difference between a reader's verdict and a writer's verdict. A reader can stop at "I loved it" or "it bored me"; a writer has to ask what produced that effect. When Blakemore calls The Goldfinch silly and bad, the useful question is not whether she is right but what standard the charge implies: silliness suggests plotting or tone that stopped convincing her, and bad suggests execution fell short of intention. Likewise, admiring a Fitzgerald novel as perfect implies a test of precision that other books failed. Our exercise: take any book you have finished and write a two-column ledger. On the left, your verdict in one sentence. On the right, three pieces of evidence: quoted lines, a scene that worked or collapsed, a choice you would steal or refuse.

Notice what this exercise forbids: vibes alone. Forcing yourself to cite specific moments converts a mood into an argument, and the argument is where reading turns into craft study. If a chapter dragged, locate the paragraph where your attention died and diagnose it: was the scene repeating information, delaying a decision, describing at the wrong scale? If a line thrilled you, work out the mechanism, whether rhythm, surprise or restraint. This is what reading like a writer adds to ordinary reading, and it is why Blakemore's blunt headline is more instructive than a polite five-star review. Verdicts with visible reasons teach technique; verdicts without reasons only teach allegiance.

Arguing With the Canon Without Arguing Badly

Disagreeing with famous books is legitimate; doing it badly is easy. The failure modes are familiar: dismissing a classic because it is old or assigned, performing outrage for attention, or hiding behind taste, where "it just wasn't for me" ends every conversation. The stronger position sits between deference and reflexive rebellion. Blakemore's verdicts are useful precisely because they are specific, attached to named books and implied standards, even where we cannot see her full reasoning in the excerpt. Our exercise: pick a canonical text from your syllabus and write both a prosecution case and a defence case, three exhibits each. You must find the best version of each side before you are allowed your own verdict, which you then state in two sentences.

The steelman step is what separates criticism from complaining. If you can articulate why generations of readers trusted Hemingway, your account of losing faith in him becomes an argument about what his style costs rather than a shrug. If you can defend The Goldfinch's ambitions, your objection to its execution gains precision. This discipline also protects you from the opposite trap, contrarianism as identity, where disliking prestigious books becomes a costume. A defensible verdict can be unpopular without being cheap. Practise the form on books you feel neutral about first; save the charged ones, the authors you were raised on, for when the habit of evidence is strong enough to survive your loyalty.

Let Your Verdicts Feed Your Voice

Critical judgment is not separate from writing; it is the steering. Knowing you admire one kind of precision and cannot forgive another kind of looseness tells you what to attempt in your own drafts and what to cut. Blakemore's interview hints at how deep this runs: her taste was visible before she could analyse it, in the chant-like dog names of Hairy Maclary and in Korky Paul's intricate grotesquerie, and she credits Jeanne Willis's The Rascally Cake, with its living cake of rotten eggs and snails, as material that found its way into The Glutton's protagonist. Our exercise: trace one obsession from your earliest reading into a current draft, then write a paragraph on what that inheritance explains about your instincts.

Finally, treat your own work with the same candour you extend to the canon. Draft a verdict on your latest piece as if a poet you respect had written it: what is genuinely working, what is silly, what you would defend. If you want outside eyes, the Cosmopolitan Writing Award accepts rolling entries with free submission, keeps valid AI feedback private, and asks you to disclose any AI assistance while your original contribution stays yours. A private assessment will not flatter you, and it should not. Honest verdicts, given and received, are how a student writer stops borrowing opinions and starts owning a voice.

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