Hotdog Book Reviewers

[namedujour]

Her diatribe is the stuff of legend, isn't it?

 

[Shade]

Lol, yes, when I googled for a phrase from it, I got 37,800 results! That's a lot of people who saved it for posterity from Amazon!

 

[Shade]

Oh and here are Anne Rice's own Amazon reviews (largely, it would seem, for stuff she's read as research for Christ the Lord). She loves everything; it's five stars all the way.

 

[lies]

Of course, she may quite wisely have changed her email address since!

No, I don't think so. According to an interview, she wants to keep in touch with her readers through that particular e-mail address.

I still think it's her "professional" e-mail address though and not her personal one.

 

[ions]

Before the Internet, we were all more or less dependent upon professional literary critics, best seller lists, and word-of-mouth to determine whether or not a book was worth reading. You may not agree with a critic, but he or she had "qualifications" of some sort.

Yeah qualifications. Worth what? We've all met educated people that were drooling morons who had no business in the business they were in. I can't count the times a "qualified" source has said something that somebody else with even just a passing knowledge of a subject would know better than to ever say. Everyone on the Internet has a soapbox to stand upon now. This is good and bad, every moron can yak away but at the same time someone who is bright and qualified is given a forum to speak that they may not otherwise have had. Weeding through the crap is the job of the responsible people who care.

So...

1) To what degree to you believe and depend upon reader reviews?

Not immensely, I tend to rely on my own intuition, but sometimes to a certain degree I do look at reviews. Very rarely do I look at a single review and use it solely to consider reading a book. I read multiple reviews and compile them as a single as best I can in my head. I mostly know what I'm looking for in a book and if a reviewer mentions it, regardless if it's mentioned in good or poor light. Sometimes through experience you can find a reviewer that you will tend to agree with, either pro or amateur, but like just about everything you have to dig through a lot of crap to get to gold.