Have you ever noticed that there is always someone who is not happy? I could give everyone in the world free pancakes and then get hate mail the next day because one of the pancakes was burned and another one tasted like paprika. An angry group would probably threaten to shoot me, others would try to cast out pancake demons from me, and one guy would send me a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head.
Media are similar to pancakes in this respect. I can read a fantastic book, then look it up on Amazon and catch a glimpse of a scathing review that completely disagrees with my perception of it. Then I feel like I’m a literary imbecile who would probably read any trash. I feel tempted to pore over the book searching for the terrible writing that the reviewer blathered on about. But I don’t really care.
One example is my current book, The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, which I think is a fantastic book on physics, and quite accessible to the average reader, but upon reading reviews I discovered that apparently some people have completely different definitions of science and literature than I do (fortunately, most of the reviews were good, so I still love this book and highly recommend it).
A particularly embarrassing example is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which I read in nearly one sitting on my way back to school after Christmas break. It was an exhilarating read, but when I looked it up online I found that most of the reviews were not about its shoddy historical claims (seriously, people have written dozens of books “debunking” it when anyone who knows how to use a computer can, in less than a minute, find a host of factual errors from the book), but rather about how terrible the writing was. And upon further reflection, I could see why they would think that. I still kind of like it, but in a way, reading those reviews ruined the book for me.
No matter how much I personally enjoy a book, someone, somewhere, is going to vehemently disagree with me. So, I have resolved to never read a negative book review again. I might read a positive one, but only if I’m sure that the reviewer isn’t only being positive because the book is good for fuel. Because books are important to me, and I’m not going to let anyone else ruin them for me no matter how bad they think the writing is. Even if the literary world suffocates under the weight of bloated prose. So there.
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