Im in the midst of one of those weeks which are so bad you pray for sleep if only to go to a world that doesn’t have this one in it. Oddly, while I’ve had nightmares galore I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream wherein I’ve had arthritis pain. Sorry. Off topic. The topic today is “books”.
Specifically, how we integrate commercial books into our lives in the post-newspaper age. Say wha? That sounds a bit heavy and college-lecturey for this blog. What is she talking about? Well, me is just talking about how it is now almost impossible to find a book you want to buy using the process of book reviews. I’ve spoken on this before, because I was stunned to hear the book reviewer for the Scene say, almost 5 years ago, that it was considered bad form to give bad reviews to books because the book market was in so much trouble.
So clearly those reviewers–the ones in newspapers–were through with being customer advocates and had started to be publisher/writer advocates.
The new day was supposed to come with the customer reviews at Amazon.com, B&N.com and other wilds of the Internet. You were supposed to be able to look up a book and see what Real People thought of it. In that way you could know if the book was worth your cash and, more importantly, your time. Good idea–until Harriet Klausner. Amazon ranked their reviewers and she was #1, all for reviews that gave every book a top or near-top ranking and a modified jacket blurb. She started to get attention, with writeups in papers and magazines, and characters named for her in novels. The Everyman Reader became an ersatz celebrity and all the honesty in Amazon reviews was out the window. The first review for the book I’m panning went on and on about how the reviewer in question loved to write reviews for this author and her last review of the author’s last book actually got featured on the cover of this book! Look for it! Her name is Fannie McSlavering and she LOVES….etc. Totally unbiased review to follow, of course…
Why am I going into all this right now? Because I spent $9.99 on a book for my Kindle that had bundles of 4- and 5-star reviews but turned out to be the most excruciating waste of my time I’ve ever experienced. Since I’ve read it I don’t feel I can ask for my money back, and since it’s electronic I don’t feel I can get the visceral thrill of letting someone else read my copy and thereby not further line the pockets of the author and publisher. And I want to tell everyone what the book is and why I didn’t like it. But having read numerous websites for numerous authors I’m now more than ever aware of how much they (authors) track what is said about them. As someone who is writing a book she knows is good enough to be published if it is ever finished, I’m also conscious of not wanting to slam a possible co-worker of sorts. I’m guilty of the very thing I’m complaining about.
I’ve got a few options in mind. I could start an anonymous book-review blog, where honest readers could submit honest thoughts under cover. I could just tell the truth on this blog. Or I could just anonymously review things on Amazon. Stay tuned…
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The book in question is by an author whose name is Ellyn Hill Dur Brand (but spelled differently.) The book’s title is Those Who Were Cast Away (kind of.) And the book was an excruciating exercise of 8 selfish people acting selfishly for tons of pages until the “mystery” end which felt thrown together and vomited back up during a brief pause in the selfishness. Stay away.
I was stunned to hear the book reviewer for the Scene say, almost 5 years ago, that it was considered bad form to give bad reviews to books because the book market was in so much trouble.
So clearly those reviewers–the ones in newspapers–were through with being customer advocates and had started to be publisher/writer advocates.
Not necessarily. I know reviewers who will only write positive reviews, but who also decline to review anything they think doesn’t deserve a good review. Mostly their thought is that there are so many things worthy of review, and so few places to publish reviews and get paid for it, that it’s a waste of their time and space to slam something. They’d rather focus other people’s attention on things they like. I can see the motivation of not wanting to harm the industry, too, but there again, there are enough things that deserve a positive review that one ought not need to write negative ones.
I don’t know that “honest” book reviews are really all that relevant either. The problem is, people get different things from different books. I know “Cynical Chris” had a running thing on his blog called “You can’t please everyone” where he would post one-star reviews from Amazon of classics.
Honestly, I have really wondered why Amazon/BN/whoever doesn’t strive more for a Netflix style recommendation system. That is, rate everything and your rating isn’t just about rating for others, but matches you to a peer group to make better recommendations to you in the future. Even sponsoring something akin to the Netflix prize.
In reality, right now most of the books I read come from recommendations from bloggers or friends that I already have some respect for their opinion anyway. Add to that a fairly large stable of authors from whom I will buy anything they care to put their name on. Just on that alone, I have a queue that teeters on unmanageably large at any time anyway, nevermind the books that cut in line because everyone is talking about them at the office or the pub.
Reviews of almost any media I tend to not put a lot of faith in. Particularly from people who are professional reviewers. The exception that proves the rule for me is Roger Ebert. I can count on the fingers of one hand the movies we have disagreed on in my entire life. Everything else, be it a book, a video game, album, etc, I tend to listed more to people who aren’t professional reviewers. Or, I wait for awards season to roll around and see who is up for the big awards.
nm, good point. I honestly had not thought of it that way. And while I understand the idea of giving legups to books with less of a chance (what your modern print-based reviewer ostensibly does) I really wish there were a place to honestly assess the books which are driven to the top of the sales pyramid by marketing.
I really think cooper has the best idea as far as that’s concerned. Because books are as indivuated in taste as films, and I’d love an honest algorithm for defining readers’ tastes. Amazon keeps recommending books I hated simply because they’re by an author in the same broad category as one where I recently bought a book. I don’t want to read that Hills girl’s book just because I bought Melissa Gilbert’s Prairie Tale.
Ohhhhh … do not get me started on the woman who kept telling me that I’d love Trollope because I loved Austen. Humans can goof as badly as algorithms. But at least you get to tell them about it.
’d love Trollope because I loved Austen.
????????
How would that even happen? To equate the two? Because they lived during the same time period and in the same country?
By that reckoning I’d love Johnathan Franzen (I don’t) because I love Stephen King (I do.)
Trollope has more in common with Dickens–and even that is often a stretch–than with Austen.
Again, though, unlike the rest of most of the women of the free world I find much of Austen to be not of my liking. (don’t kill me.)
Well, the funniest part of it is that the only books by Trollope I can stomach at all (because I just don’t enjoy his style) are his books about politics (where, I take it, he had a lot of personal experience to give color to his narrative). Which have nothing to do with anything Austen ever wrote. I took it that this woman couldn’t tell the difference among stories with horseback as a means of transportation.