A recent, cheerful (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) blog post written by Marianna Baer exhorts readers to write only positive reviews of books:
Resolve to make 2011 the year of positivity in the literary world! Eliminate all negative critical discussion of books! Put down your scalpels and pick up your pom-poms!....Give 5 stars to all books you rate on Goodreads!It's a philosophy that many people subscribe to, especially in the land of kids' lit: the only field I know where colleagues spend so much of their energy complimenting and supporting one another. It's as if, because the product is designed for kids, the creators should be treated with kid gloves. Or perhaps because the profession boasts so many amateurs (meaning unpaid and unpublished, not incompetent), there is a perception of fragility.
In October of 2010, a positive-review-only blog was born with the tagline, "Where everyone from casual readers to bestselling authors gush [emphasis in original] about their favorite books." It goes on to explain, "We're not a bunch of literary pushovers, we just see no point in telling you about a book if we didn't like it." It turns out a lot of bloggers follow this review policy, not wanting to waste time and space reviewing books they didn't enjoy. (Of course, professional reviewers don't have this option when writing for a review journal.)
When did dissection of an artistic work and expression of strong opinions become politically incorrect? How did compliment inflation seep into our writing culture? Academic researchers at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, believe that a seminar presentation to colleagues that results in no criticism is a waste of time. For them, polite clapping is a more damning commentary than spirited critique and questioning.
Somehow, in all this slipshod, sugary, female thinking, we're losing sight of the beauty of the negative review. Negative reviews inform. Negative reviews also entertain, whereas positive reviews almost never do (unless you're the author of the book being positively reviewed).
Here's a useful tool I've discovered when looking for the next book to read: I survey the two-star reviews on Goodreads. This is why it works:
- The reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble are undependable. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to which customers choose to post. And who are those Vine Voices reviewers anyway? Goodreads, on the other hand, is made up mostly of users who love to read.
- That said, Goodreads reviewers who give a book one star typically couldn't finish the book. Their written opinion is irrelevant to me, although it's important to include their one star in the book's average star rating.
- Three-star reviews are so wishy-washy they're of no help.
- Goodreads reviewers who give a book four or five stars gush about the book almost exclusively. They also tend to summarize the plot in gory detail before they begin editorializing.
- Two-star reviews, on the other hand, are written by people who love to read, who finished the book, and who often have something interesting to say about what went wrong (and sometimes about what went right). Their reviews don't necessarily deter me from reading the book, they just tell me in a concise and sometimes comically snarky way what went wrong for them.
[Note: on 12/4/2012 I turned off comments on this post because it was getting a lot of spam. Sorry for the inconvenience!]