"Luminous," a reminder.

The NYT has a piece called "Luminous New Historical Fiction," so let's review the history of "luminous" on this blog.

I've said it all before, and I've summed it up before. So I will simply republish this post of mine from September 27, 2022:

"I thought the memo had gone out that the word 'luminous' had been banned from book reviews."

I wrote in December 2009, recalling a wonderful 2007 essay by Joe Queenan. In "Astonish Me," Queenan wrote:

Several years ago, overwhelmed by the flood of material unleashed annually by the publishing industry, I decided to establish a screening program by purchasing only books that at least one reviewer had described as ''astonishing.'' 

Previously, I had limited my purchases to merchandise deemed ''luminous'' or ''incandescent,'' but this meant I ended up with an awful lot of novels about bees, Provence or Vermeer. The problem with incandescent or luminous books is that they veer toward the introspective, the arcane or the wise, while I prefer books that go off like a Roman candle. When I buy a book, I don't want to come away wiser or happier or even better informed. I want to get blown right out of the water by the author's breathtaking pyrotechnics. I want to come away astonished. 

He was making fun of the absurd overuse of the verb "astonish" in book promotions.

[T]he truth is, if nobody describes a book as astonishing, it probably isn’t astonishing, and if it isn’t astonishing, who needs it?

I remembered that essay 2 years after I read it, as I was reading the New York Times piece "10 Best Books of 2009," which called a memoir "luminous." I said "How can I trust their judgment? To be fair, they didn't call anything 'incandescent' or 'astonishing.'" 

And I'm remembering it again, now 15 years later, as I'm seeing — at Grammarphobia — that there's a new book, "Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of Literary Persuasion," by Louise Willder. 

The blub is ‘my 100 words of little white lies’, she says. ‘There has to be some kind of sugar coating and, yes, lying.’ Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere, and Willder would like to see fewer shopworn adjectives on book covers, specifically ‘luminous’, ‘dazzling’, ‘incandescent’, ‘stunning’, ‘shimmering’, ‘sparkling’, ‘glittering’, ‘devastating’, ‘searing’, ‘shattering’, ‘explosive’, ‘epic’, ‘electrifying’, ‘dizzying’, ‘chilling’, ‘staggering’, ‘deeply personal’ and the ubiquitous ‘haunting’. 

Hooray! Publishers (and reviewers), take note. I never could understand ‘incandescent’. Even light bulbs aren’t incandescent anymore. And while we’re at it, I’d like to blue-pencil the noun phrases ‘rite of passage’, ‘coming of age’ and ‘richly woven tapestry’....

What words can you use when all the words have been used before? It's promotion, so you can't just use the truth as your guiding light. So I'll just say let your guiding light be never go toward the light. If you're describing a text, never use metaphors suggesting that the words are emitting light. So no "luminous,"  no "incandescent," no "glittering" or "shimmering" or "sparkling."