This past month, I started a few books I didn’t finish. Reading is hit-and-miss like that: sometimes you’ll accidentally pick books that don’t interest you, or that you find difficult to understand. When I find I’m not enjoying a book, though, I don’t generally think, “Oh, this is shitty.” Instead I think, “Okay, this book clearly wasn’t written for a person like me”, or, “Maybe I’m not ready for this book yet.” It’s my fault I don’t like the book, not the writer’s.
I often wonder what the point is of going out of your way to review a book you didn’t enjoy reading. Firstly, there’s the question of why exactly you wasted your time finishing the book in the first place. There are millions of books out there: why block out hours of your life in order to have a bad time? Are you some kind of masochist? If you don’t enjoy a book, put it down, return it to the library, throw it out the window, whatever. Just forget about the book and get on with your life.
What do you hope to achieve in publishing a negative review? If you want to warn people not to buy a book, wouldn’t the best idea be to just keep your mouth shut and hope said book sinks without a trace? From a writer’s perspective, any publicity is good publicity: the worse you trash-talk a book, the more that book will seem appealing to a certain subset of those who read your review.
In general, I think negative reviews are written out of a sense of spite. On a really basic level, perhaps the reviewer is angry they’ve just blown $30. But generally I think there’s something more to it. The reviewer wants to demonstrate their superiority to the author by revealing, systematically, exactly how the book has failed to live up to the reviewer’s expectations. The reviewer would like the author to feel guilty about being published. That’s not really a review. It’s a way for one person to make themselves feel better by putting another person down.
Alternatively, the reviewer might be taking a swipe at other readers who did happen to enjoy the book, saying something of the form, “If you enjoyed this book, it’s because you don’t understand anything about Real Literature.”
I have no problem with reviewers who enjoy a book enough to finish reading, but have found shortcomings which they believe merit discussion. But in general, I think if you’re writing 1 star reviews of books, and you aren’t getting paid to do so, you’re probably a bit of an arsehole and should examine your motivations. You’re jumping on the opportunity to attack somebody for being brave and daring enough to create something and send a part of themselves out into the world. That’s cowardly.
We should talk about the books we like and promote the things we love. I kinda thought that was obvious.
Comments
7 responses to “Why Review The Things You Hate?”
If anything is a comedy goldmine, a terrible book is. What if your motive is just to make people laugh?
You’re right, Jesse. It depends on your motives. If you find a book so unbelievably terrible it will result in my peeing myself laughing, *please please please* review it. Those kind of books are the best.
Connor, I have some questions:
– if it’s your job to write book reviews, then you don’t purchase the books. They are assigned to you, and then you write your review. How do you propose reviewers avoid books they don’t like?
– isn’t it a reviewer’s job to write honestly? One negative book review isn’t going to kill a book. Many negative reviews might, but then the argument can be made that the book should be killed?
– do you really think we should just discuss the things we love? isn’t there a place for criticism, for critiquing? lovefests are boring. discussion (discussion = all points of view) is interesting.
Sure, I reckon there’s a bunch of stuff to factor in. I just keep coming back to the one issue: there are millions of books out there, and it doesn’t make sense (to me) to waste time telling people “You shouldn’t read this”.
Criticism, in my mind, should be about finding the best stuff and teasing out how it could be even better. People who love something are often the most picky and critical. (I’m thinking of my family here).
But ‘criticism’ can’t have a malleable definition. If everyone does it their own way, then there is no continuity or cohesion.
As our old friend Wikipedia says:
‘Criticism is the judgement (using analysis and evaluation) of the merits and faults of the actions or work of another individual. Criticism can mean merely to evaluate without necessarily finding fault; however, usually the word implies the expression of disapproval.’
And also, how it can be a waste of time telling people, ‘You shouldn’t read this?’ Isn’t this in fact saving others their time?
I’m sort of coming at it from the perspective that it’s a waste of time saying “you shouldn’t read this”, because that time/space could be better spent promoting a work that is super duper fantastic.