Summary: 1-star reviews on Amazon.com often represent little glimpses into anonymous lives. Sometimes, though, they help you to find mild diversions.
I like reading 1-star reviews on Amazon, it helps to find things like this...
BLOT: (23 Sep 2013 - 11:42:05 AM)
I like reading 1-star reviews on Amazon, it helps to find things like this...
The true gold of Amazon's flawed review ecosystem are the 1-star reviews. Whether it is someone not understanding how to leave packaging feedback or a person bitching about Kindle pricing or being mildly disappointed in an author's book because they really liked (5-stars!) the last one, they tend to be a rawer glimpse into the diseased mind of the reviewer than 5-star reviews, which smell bland and taste worst half the time. Any one can effuse drippy praise; it is sharp, mildly misdirected hate that delights: typos, strangely specific complaints, staggering leaps of logic. Ah, the myriad spices of life. Also, sometimes you find stuff like this: a writer's 234 [and counting] 1-star (and occasional 2-star) reviews where he slams books for a variety of reasons and sometimes tosses in literal poetry and/or something like short fiction that may or may not have anything to do with the book in question. For example, on Sam Lipsyte's
Hurried, driven...I must flee, to a field of purple neon poppies and a tree where it is absent all and everything and most entirely, especially volumes, books, tomes, compendiums, albums, bestsellers, booklets, editions, folios, hardcovers, monographs, novels, octavos, omnibus', opus', opuscules, paperbacks, periodicals, portfolios, quartos, softcovers and scrolls. No, in this field are only barren bookcases that expand and contract, sounding out a hopeless revolution.
Reading through more than a page or two is kind of a slog, though there are gems. When I did a brief search around to find out a little more, I found stuff like this (written 5 years ago) and this (written 9 months ago) and this (from last month), three articles about his varied-through-similar sounding epistles through email or online forums or Twitter [his account is currently private, making most of the conversations one-sided and without context]. Is this marketing for his writing? Performance art? An attempt to briefly shed the boredom of life?
Anyhow, there you have it.
Thoughts on Reading, Literature, and Book Culture
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: September 2013
dickens of a blog
Written by Doug Bolden
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