cover blurb complaints

I've got a rule of thumb- never read a book a reviewer describes as "luminous".

It's got to be the single most overused, meaningless word in the entire cover blurb industry.

It is epidemic in contemporary literary fiction, the stuff you won't find on the pocket book rack at the drugstore. Books that actually got a hardcover print run (even if 9/10ths of it ended up being remaindered) and that are only in print in that expensive trade paperback format, like they're trying to make up for a lack of popular appeal by holding admirers up for an extra seven bucks a copy (hmm, maybe literary fiction and boxing have more in common than I thought. Although not even unceremoniously retired broadcasterLarry Merchant had the stones to describe a fight at 'luminous').


On the opposite side of the blurb spectrum, yesterday I came across an excellent phrase on the back of a book by Primo Levi.
One reviewer described him as exhibiting "great moral stamina" in the creation of the work.

As wonderfully descriptive as it is, it doesn't serve the commercial intent of the cover blurb all that well. That must be why our modern blurb writers all draw from the same pot of blandly complimentary euphemisms.