The Amazon.Com Method of Rage Maintenance

I was in a filthy mood all day (for reasons completely unrelated to the not-going-swimmingly-well writing of the new book) and was determined to maintain my crankiness even in the face of friends and family being deliberately and annoyingly Pollyannaishly up and bouncy. Good cheer in the face of stubborn irritability is just rude. Luckily I came across a sure-fire way to feed my peevishness and still be bent over my computer appearing to be hard at work: looking up the amazon.com reviews of my favourite books and reading only those with one star (the lowest rating).

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter turns out to be anti-male feminist propoganda by someone who likes to have sex with horses. Who knew?

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith is but a pale shadow of the excrutiating, train-wreck of a film version from 1999.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin is dated, boring, with one-dimensional characters, no plot, an incomprehensible made-up language and only won awards because the judges were on drugs.

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson? Boring, flat, predictable and illogical.

The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys—more feminist bilge apparently.

Pride and Prejudice is boring with no appeal to the MTV generation—despite being a nineteenth-century version of the Jerry Springer show—written by a slacker with too much description and not enough meat. Apparently you should skip "Bronte" and read Hemmingway or Poe instead.

And every book ever by Dorothy Dunnett? Over-written, pretentious and confusing. These reviewers can't figure out what's happening or what the character's motivations are and it makes them frothingly ropeable. "I am no idiot" most of these reviews begin. No comment.

I'm a post-structuralist kind of a girl. I understand that everyone reads differently. Everyone sees the world differently. Hell, I've reread some books I hated first time and discovered they were actually works of genius. Was I on crack the first time I read them? Or the second time? Difference is good, it's what makes the world interesting. Just because someone dislikes a book that is a touchstone of my existence doesn't mean they're a bad person.

Unless, of course, their reasons for not liking some of the best books ever written are completely puerile, badly-spelled, punctuated and written, and clearly indicate that they have no idea what "everlasting", "anthropology" or "historical" mean. Then all bets are off.

No-one should be allowed to post a review about a book they've been forced to read for school, or university, or for their book group (especially if it was recommended by the member of the group they hate most). I can't think of a book I was made to read at school that I actually liked: Great Gatsby, Flaws in the Glass, Middlemarch I hated them all with a fiery burning passion only to find years later (with the exception of Flaws) that they're all pretty good.

Though some of my favourites were generated by poor bastards compelled by their wives to read Dunnett and Austen. I wonder how long the marriage lasted after the husband declared that Pride & Prejudice is "turgid. Dull. Truly awful prose. Surely nobody ever spoke like these utterly implausible characters. Literary mogadon."

After several productive hours of perusing more and more bad reviews on Amazon, an odd thing happened: I cheered up. A lot. The reviews were making me laugh, and even the most wrong-headed ones reminded me of why I loved the book they were shitting on. I started to get disappointed when there were none or hardly any bad reviews of Isak Dinesen's stories, or Wendy Walker's The Secret Service, or Caroline Stevermer & Patricia Wrede's Sorcery and Cecelia. How had these books failed to generate hatred? What had they done wrong? Were they as good as I remembered?

The rest of the day was spent judiciously rereading them just to make sure I hadn't made some dreadful mistake. So far so good. Reading is so much easier than writing.

New York City, 28 June 2004

© 2004 Justine Larbalestier

previous musing next musing

Current Musings Musings Archive