Celine Dion throws rose petals after a Las Vegas concert last month.

AP / Isaac Brekken

There’s dislike, and then there’s hatred, and when it comes to artists who make you want to run screaming in the other direction, Celine Dion bests most.

The Canadian singer is an international star, adored by millions for her clear, muscular voice and its penchant for connecting with diverse crowds. But many also openly detest her, viewing her ubiquitous presence as a blight on the cultural skyline.

Critic Carl Wilson dives headlong into this fertile, galvanizing topic in Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Its title springs from Dion’s most famous album (the one with Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On”) and lives up to it on multiple levels.

Wilson writes and edits for Canada’s national paper the Globe and Mail in Toronto, and his initial revulsion at taking Dion seriously rings deeply due to his nationality. Ostensibly an exploration of the aesthetics and subjectivity of taste, Let’s Talk About Love also includes a surprising (and surprisingly interesting) amount of Dion’s history as an artist and Wilson’s squirrelly cultural self-examination.

As Wilson pointed out in a recent essay for Powells.com, his book follows most in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series in looking at the larger socio-cultural contexts of seminal albums, as opposed to simply unpacking the immediate context in which they were created or consumed. It happens that Love is the first of the Continuum series to consider an album for its overt awfulness instead of its value in the critical canon. And this could be the best of the series.

Chapter titles follow the book’s title (“Let’s Talk About Hate,” “Let’s Talk About Schmaltz,” “Let’s Talk With Some Fans”) and stay relentlessly on-topic through the pocket tome’s brisk 176 pages. We follow Wilson through research and consideration, soul-searching and critical exfoliation, and even to Las Vegas to see one of Dion’s stage shows.

The writing is razor-sharp and unerringly intelligent, occasionally veering toward academia (sans jargon) but mostly adhering to conversational tones.

And really, there’s nothing wrong with the scholarly approach — the constant citations, quotes from forbears and wide-angle observations only enhance Wilson’s points, and he nails them succinctly.

But the wordiness is occasionally too much.

Wilson eventually comes to several realizations about his own formerly restrictive tastes, even playing Let’s Talk About Love at high volumes in his cavernous apartment to drive home his own discomfort. Along the way we’re afforded a fascinating and refreshingly even-handed overview of the history of aesthetics.

Ultimately, the book fulfills the role of all worthy and lasting criticism: It actually makes you want to hear the album.