In Which I Am Deeply Amused

Sometimes I prowl around Amazon for no good reason. I’m not looking to buy a book (my pile of as-yet-unread books is ridiculously large), I just enjoy surfing aimlessly. I read book reviews and excerpts, then I move on to what “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” and riffle through the reader comments. It’s a fun way to pass the time (fun if you’re me, at any rate…) The reader comments section is always my favourite. It often amazes me how people can either love a book and hail it as some literary masterpiece, or completely despise it and call for it to be boycotted by all sound-minded folk. Perhaps people only take the time to log into Amazon and type out a review if they love or hate a book, thus explaining the absence of middling reader reviews. I don’t know if this is a fact. All I do know is that on the sales page of a memoir written by a famous New York writer, this love/hate dynamic is more apparent than usual; and that when I read the titles of the 1 star reviews (i.e. they really, really hated it), I found myself deeply amused. Here they be:

“a bore”, “Pathetic”, “Run screaming from the room…”, “Unreadable!”, “Please just stop”, “Enough already!”, “Phooey”; and my personal favourite, “This book should kill itself”.

Well, it made me smile. Maybe I’m just weird.