Charles Taylor not only likes A Reader’s Manifesto—he thinks it is an essential part of a critic’s library:
A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers — It says something about the blood drawn by Myers’ argument for lucidity in literary prose that the writers who attacked it found it necessary to falsify it to make their (rigged) points. Not one of them has explained why, if Myers is arguing for dumbed-down prose, he extols Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce. Though their insularity does make a pretty good argument for how easily literature could go the way of the spinnet in the parlor.