| The Humorous Side of Book Reviewing, or Is It? | |||||
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If the traditional newspaper book review is an endangered species, as the National Book Critics Circle suggests (see my previous column), how fortunate that the Internet review has emerged to take its place. While I still have hope for the traditional review, I’ve embraced the on-line reviewers of the twenty-first century, and even joined them. As I began research for my coming column on Internet reviews and reviewers, I encountered the “What’s the world coming to?” side of the book review world. Therefore, I’ll temporarily abandon my semi-scholarly approach to inject some humor (such as it is). Are the following excerpts examples of the “dumbing down” of American education, or of the democratization of publishing and book reviewing, or of something else? Here are samples from some negative reviews of various science fiction works, as quoted by Carol Pinchefski at the InterGalactic Medicine Show site: “I weep for the souls of the trees that died to make this book.” “I have come across some truly awful books. And yet not a single one of them has managed to cause me as much gastrointestinal distress as this one.” “[The second book] stinks, and the stench is so bad that it reaches backwards in time and taints the [first] volume.” “The occasional good parts of the book weren’t really all that good at all; they just seemed that way by comparison to the other even-slower parts. I found the . . . footnotes to be slightly more entertaining.” “It’s not a bad story. It’s just not a very good one.” And how about these Amazon customer reviews, among those collected by Charles Stross in “Reviews of classics” and brought to my attention by my fellow Chicago-area writer, Cheryl Hagedorn, author of Park Ridge: A Senior Center Murder. “1984 is the worst book I have ever read. I would advise anyone who is thinking about reading this book to reconsider! George Orwell is not a bad writer; however, this book he does not do very well on, as some of his others. Perhaps he was getting old and lost his touch. Animal Farm was okay, but 1984 was horrible. . . . I haven’t ever met someone who could write such a boring book about the government. . . . I am not at all interested in government. This may be part of the reason that I didn’t like it.” Or here is a more specific review about a book in the same genre, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. “This is the worst book that I have ever read! . . . He was writing about something that could never happen to our society. Back then he thought that our world would pretty much go to hell and the book portrayed the world that we should be living in today. Nothing that he said made sense. I don’t understand why he would want anyone to live in that weird world that those people had to live in. People should have emotions and actual relationships. No one should be punished like that.” How about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence, this review quoted by a reader of Charlie Stross’ article: “This book was SO moving. It brought up a few important issues, like sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, and guess what? Sex! It is disgusting how the world has become nowadays. It’s disgraceful! God-fearing people, stay away from this book!!!! It’s trash for your mind and brings up perverted topics. You shouldn’t read this book. We didn’t. It’s a book of scandal, corruption, seduction, and SIN!!!” I’m not saying that everyone should appreciate every book, no matter how well known. But isn’t it sad that someone should be “not at all interested in government”? That may tell us something about our current electoral process. And isn’t it too bad that a reader has so little understanding of Huxley’s purpose as to assume that he’s advocating the Brave New World society for us all? As my students proved to me long ago, irony and satire are often wasted on the young, and probably on some of their elders as well. And isn’t it strange that Lady Chatterley’s reviewer(s) hadn’t read the book???? Finally, here’s a review of Shakespeare’s popular Romeo and Juliet: “Not that I don’t like Shakespeare’s works, but his tragedies are terrible especially this one. . . . Here are some of the things that confuse me: How did this feud really begin? A reader of Charles Stross’ article added, “I think people can have some problems with older classic works if they don’t understand the context of the times the book was written in. I love Romeo and Juliet, but if you’re looking at it from a modern standpoint you pretty much have to wonder why they don’t just tell their parents to fuck off and move out on their own. Or else get over themselves and find someone else.” I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the reviews above. Some could be parodies, some written by mischievous teenagers; anything goes on line. Still, reading them sent me on a quest to learn more about the art of book reviewing in general. An article entitled “How to Write a Book Review” from the Dalhousie University Libraries web site points out that there are two basic approaches to book reviewing: the descriptive and the critical. The critical review is the more scholarly one, the descriptive one perhaps more directed toward producing book sales. I believe that most reviews are combinations of the two types. The Dalhousie article lists these basic requirements for a critical book review: 1. An attempt to understand what the author’s purpose is and how the component parts of the work contribute to that purpose, and also some knowledge of the author: his/her nationality, time period, other works, etc. 2. An understanding of the art form and how it functions, so that the reviewer has an historical or literary standard upon which to base his/her evaluation. Authentic or not, the reviews above obviously lack these requirements. More than a year ago, at the time when my first book, Reinventing Myself: Memoirs of a Retired Professor, had been reviewed positively by several people, I encountered an on-line review that inspired a post on my blog, “Never too Late!” Here it is: Unknown Authors and Internet Reviewers ( This title was inspired in part by Lord Byron’s satirical poem “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” 1809.) “I’ve read good reviews, mediocre reviews, bad reviews, and mixed reviews. An unknown author learns to rejoice in all of them if they indicate that someone has at least read his or her book and expressed honest opinions of it. However, today I noticed what may be a new kind of review: the ‘I didn't really read the book, but I’ll write a review anyway.’ I don’t object to the negative parts of the review (it’s not technically a ‘bad review’) but to the fact that it clearly indicates ignorance of the book’s contents and some very basic facts. “After correctly listing my name and the book’s title, the reviewer repeatedly refers to me as ‘Dr. Stone.’ First, my name is not Stone, and second, I do not have a doctorate. Then he refers to my long teaching career at ‘St. Olaf’s College.’ My father graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and my brother taught there for many years, but I did neither. My forty-year teaching career was at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. The reviewer could have found the correct information on the back cover of my book. He even implies that I retired from my lofty position as a professor and then became a lowly secretary, and he wonders how I feel about that. Well, I do some secretarial work for a neighbor occasionally, but it’s hardly a career--and the whole matter and how I feel about it are explained on pages 95-96. “The reviewer does say that I am a good writer (Thanks!), but he shows little understanding of what I tried to do or why. As an occasional book reviewer myself, I never review a book unless I’ve read 95% to 100% of it and formed some idea of who the author is and of his or her purpose. And I always take time to get the basic facts straight! “I shall not identify this reviewer or the relatively unknown web site, since I have no desire to recommend either, and fortunately, there are several more valid reviews of my book on the Internet. Were I to judge this reviewer as superficially as he apparently judged my book, I’d say that he’s an intellectual snob who has a problem with older women who write--but that’s not fair to say, is it?” Is this column a rant about the current state of education, reading, and/or writing? Actually, it’s an attempt to inject some dark humor into the greater darkness of winter. It may prove, at least to me, that book reviews and book reviewing make up a far more complex subject than I’d realized. Next: On-Line Book Reviews Links: Carol Pinchefsky, “Wizard Oil”: http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=carol_pinchefsky&article=011 . Charles Stross: “Charlie’s Diary”: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/10/the_book_is_not_that_interesti.html Cheryl Hagedorn: “Senior Center Murders”: http://murder.booklocker.com/2006/12/30/what-to-do-with-a-review/ |
