Where Readers Vent About Bad Books

In Need of Some Amazon Group Therapy
Where Readers Gather to Vent About Bad Books
by Cynthia Crossen

Has this ever happened to you? A book has the critics in full-throttle gush and then wins a big prize and/or becomes a bestseller. So you read it, or start it, anyway. You don't like it, but you know you must be wrong. That makes you hate it even more because it's making you feel like a clod.

It's time for Amazon group therapy, where readers like you gather to vent about bad books. "This was the first book I've ever thrown in the garbage," one reader wrote about Anne Enright's "The Gathering." Another said, "Reading this book was purgatory."


I also didn't like "The Gathering," a novel about a typically dysfunctional Irish-Catholic family (alcoholism, suicide, poverty, blah, blah, blah). But professional critics hyperventilated over it ("fierce and beautiful"; "lyrical and clever"), and it won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

Some of Amazon's amateur critics, however, had revenge fantasies about it: "I'm trying to think of someone I don't like so I can give this book to them for Christmas," one reader wrote. Another, on Amazon UK, said, "At the book club we even joked about having a ritual burning of it as we disliked it so much." Those words were a comfort to me.

Generally, I don't write about books I didn't enjoy. Why waste your time telling you not to read something? But I've read my share of books that disappointed me, and an astounding (to me) number of them have been darlings of the literary-industrial complex. Sometimes I think it's an elaborate practical joke by critics and judges on us ordinary readers.

Amazon makes it easy for you to find your affinity group, although the positive reviews aren't nearly as much fun to read. On-line critics award from one to five stars (many readers resent that they aren't permitted to give zero -- or even negative -- stars). You can click right to the one-star (or any other star) reviews, and wallow in other people's censure.

I always find people who think I'm right and everyone else is wrong. Their criticism can be succinct and eloquent. About John Banville's "The Sea," another Man Booker winner I couldn't finish, a British reader wrote, "As my own professor used to say, 'This writing has an awful lot of so-whattedness about it.'" Another amateur critic with weaker spelling was more passionate: "OMG This book was so hard to get into. It is the only book I have never finished, and I read probably a book a weak. How do books as boring as this get any kind of awards? Literary Geanius or not, if it does not entertain then I am not into it."

Denis Johnson has often been described as a literary genius, but I turned to Amazon for consolation when I found his prize-winning novel, "Tree of Smoke," unreadable. "Ghastly prose, flat cardboard-cut-out characters and would-be Pynchonian paranoid theories of history that go exactly nowhere," one reader wrote. Another was bitter: "Denis Johnson owes me eight hours of my life I'll never get back."

The classics get raked over, too. "Moby Ick's more like it," one reader said. About "The Great Gatsby," readers have written: "excellent substitute for valium"; "This is a book you should read when there is absolutely nothing else to read. If there is anything else at all, read that instead"; and my favorite, "It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops."

Amazon therapy brought me back from the edge when I was being driven crazy by Alice Sebold's novel, "The Lovely Bones." This was one of the few books I have ever started, hated, thrown away, watched it climb the bestseller lists, picked it up again, hated it again. But everywhere I went, I saw that pale blue cover, and I was tormented by self-doubt. Amazon readers rode to my rescue:

"This book is best summed up as an Afterschool Special -- Teenaged Murder brought to you by Hallmark," one reader wrote. Another was more practical: "On the positive side, it is short, there are no typos, and I didn't pay my own money for it." Finally: "This story is told from the point of view of a dead girl. I wish she had just stayed dead and not bothered to tell us a story."



From the Wall Street Journal