What one-star Amazon reviews of classic books reveal about taste and judgements around it
There’s one question that celebrities of all shades and stripes frequently get asked that I imagine causes them considerable anxiety: ‘what are you currently reading?’ In theory, this question does not have a right or wrong answer, but in reality we all know that’s a lie. Peruse any list of books celebrities love (like this one) and you’ll see what I mean. Does Nicole Kidman really opt for ‘Leo Tolstoy’s formidable work War & Peace as her book of inspiration’? Does Lena Dunham really find ‘creative stimulation in the complex, troubled characters of Vladimir Nabokov’? Truly?
Full confession. I have read neither War & Peace nor Lolita and I can’t see myself getting around to reading either of them before I die, unless I am possessed by a highly literate demon with a masochistic bent. For the record, the book that I am currently reading is Brandon Sanderson’s The Lost Metal – part of his Mistborn fantasy series; before that it was Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations – an urban fantasy series. Basically, name any popular-but-derided series over the past two decades – from The Da Vinci Code to the Twilight chronicles – and the chances are high that I’ve read it.
I suspect that my low-brow reading tastes are one of the reasons why I was an early adopter of the Kindle, despite being a committed Luddite in every other part of my life.1 This is because books are fundamentally intertwined with judgements about taste. As I’ve previously noted in relation to movies, taste becomes a form of ‘distinction’: the term used by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe the ways in which differences in taste become the basis of social judgement. One of Bourdieu’s key insights was that while we think of taste as something natural and personal, it is also thoroughly social.
Books are a perfect illustration of class differences in taste, in part because the poorer you are, the less likely you are to read them – a point that holds as true for the UK today as it was in 1960s France (the time and place Bourdieu was writing about). But where Bourdieu’s work gets particularly interesting was not just in relation to who reads and who doesn’t, but the kinds of books people read.
Take prize-winning novels – a.k.a. ‘literary’ as opposed to ‘genre’ fiction.2 Bourdieu found that the consumption of prize-winning novels was class-based. But opinions on the legitimacy of awardees tended to conform more as you moved down the social ladder – i.e., amongst the people who hadn’t actually read them. Interestingly, the people most likely to dispute the legitimacy of such prizes are those with the highest cultural capital (i.e., those with social assets like education, intellect, the ‘right’ accent, etc.).
Indeed, at least for artists and intellectuals, religiously reading prize-winning novels is a sign of being irredeemably ‘bourgeois’. This is explains why Jonathan Franzen chucked a tantrum when his novel The Corrections was selected for Oprah’s Book Club; you see, the nomination besmirched his book’s ‘high-art’ literary credentials.
I was thinking about Bourdieu’s work recently, after reading an article on Better Book Titles titled ‘Everybody’s a critic – the best of the worst funny one-star reviews on Goodreads. The piece begins with the implicitly Bourdieusian observation that: ‘I spend way too much time on Goodreads. Frankly, it’s a wonderful place to brag about what you’re currently reading so that strangers know you are smart and like all the right books’.
While Bourdieu had much to say about review journals, it strikes me that Goodreads and Amazon reviews provide an equally valuable cultural resource for those interested in social judgements around taste – especially one-star reviews of classics. These are the books we all know we’re supposed to like because we’ve been repeatedly told so: by English teachers, by celebrities, by endless movie adaptations, by society at large.
Yet, as the Better Book Titles article itself illustrates, many of us don’t like these books. Wuthering Heights might have inspired Kate Bush’s most famous song, but I’m personally inclined to agree with the Goodreads review: ‘People are angry and then they die’. Conversely, while I did enjoy Pride and Prejudice, I can’t really disagree with the Goodreads reviewer who concludes: ‘Just a bunch of people going into each other’s houses’.
However, I wonder whether the old rules around taste and judgement apply when the reviewer is anonymous and there are no social repercussions for expressing your adoration of, say, Fifty Shades of Grey. Can we really assume anything about the class background of the almost 112,000 reviewers with names like ‘Amazon customer’ who have, on average, given it five stars?
What follows is an examination of one-star reviews of classic books on Amazon to see what they might reveal and taste, and judgements around it, in the internet age, starting with the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice.
1. Pride and Prejudice
Negative reviews of Pride and Prejudice3 on Amazon are few and far between, so it just about fits the title of ‘universally loved book’. However, the negative reviews are, for the most part, rather eclectic. One review, mysteriously titled ‘Too much pride no prejudice’, simply states, ‘George was my favourite character’, which is, at the very least, a rather unorthodox view of a character (George Wickham) portrayed in the book as an amoral libertine. Another review, quite possibly written by a student assigned the book at school, is even shorter. Titled simply ‘One star’, the author informs readers that ‘Jane Austen sucks’.
Equally unimpressed with the book but a little clearer on the perceived source of the problem, a review titled ‘Ehh’ states, ‘Kept waiting for the good part but it never came’. This theme is elaborated on in ‘A disgrace’, where the author emphasises, echoing almost word-for-word the previously quoted Goodreads review, a dislike of all the houses:
‘To be completely honest, I wanted to enjoy this reading. I love older literature and I was hoping I’d love this as well. Unfortunately, this is just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses. A complete waste of my time and money’.
This sentiment is largely shared in a review titled ‘What a disappointment!’, although this one is notable for the comparison it draws to another classic romance, highlighting the author’s credentials to assess the genre:
‘Having heard about the book forever but never saw a movie of it, I thought it would be like Jane Eyre. Wrong wrong. Endless vapid dialogue about money and marriage. None of the beautiful language and poetry of Bronte’.
2. Jane Eyre
Given the reviewer’s insistence on the superiority of Jane Eyre over Pride and Prejudice, I was curious to see what one-star reviews the former had garnered, not being particularly fond of it myself. Was it simply that I was ‘wrong, wrong!’, and this is the rare classic that is actually rather than almost universally loved?
Although Eyre has slightly fewer low ratings than Prejudice, the reviews tend to be similarly idiosyncratic in their criticisms. For instance, when most contemporary readers think of the novel’s content, I assume that ‘anti-Christian’ doesn’t immediately spring to mind.4 But one reviewer was clearly incensed by what they saw as the book’s prejudice against Christianity. In a review titled ‘Yet Another Book That Speaks Against Christians’,5 the author writes,
This book is about a girl who goes through many troubles throughout her life. Many of which seem to be blamed on the Church. The author must realize that in all denominations of the Christian faith, the leaders under Jesus are all human and (therefore) subject to human error... To all Christian parents, I strongly recommend against letting your children read this book as it is very offensive.
A more mainstream critique of Jane Eyre can be found in a review titled ‘I wasted a few weeks reading this glorified soap opera’. Although I agree with the central premise, striking is the author’s relentless name-dropping of other classics in order to make the case that the novel is rubbish:
I could have read Dostoyevsky, Proust, Tolstoy, or O’Connor. I could have read Don Quixote a second time or sailed again with Captain Ahab on his philosophical quest. Instead, I wasted a few weeks reading this glorified soap opera with what is perhaps one the the [sic] most unintentional comic endings in all of literature. Onward, Sancho, onward!
Now call me a thickie, because I have no clue who ‘O’Connor’ is referring to,6 but even I recognised the reference to ‘Captain Ahab on his philosophical quest’, so off I went to check out Moby Dick.
3. Moby Dick
In all honesty, I have not read Moby Dick myself, so am not well placed to judge its merits, but my favourite review of this book, hands down, is one titled ‘Not enough dicks’. Short and sweet, the review simply states, ‘There were no dicks in this book’.7
I assume this review is a joke (it is not, I observe, a verified purchase), but the beauty of Amazon is that we simply don’t know. Maybe they thought they were buying a book of dick pics (‘moby’, after all, is British slang for a mobile phone). Maybe they thought they were buying a book about the singer Moby’s dick. Who knows? Of course, literary scholars can insist all they want that the book is full of phallic jokes about ‘cream’ and ‘milk’, but if you genuinely want a book about dicks, then metaphoric ones aren’t gonna cut it.
In any case, unlike Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, Moby Dick gets a plethora of negative reviews on Amazon, despite its high overall rating. These are primarily to due its ‘mind-numbing’ descriptive and repetitive prose – as a selection of titles from one-star reviews illustrates: ‘Any high school English teacher who assigns “Moby Dick” as mandatory reading should be charged with child abuse’; ‘I sure hope you enjoy learning about whales’; ‘How is this considered a classic?!?!’. In one review titled ‘Just because everyone says it’s good doesn’t mean it’s good’, the reviewer is so disgusted by the book that he gives high school students tips on how to avoid reading it.
But for my money, the prize goes to a 500+ word review titled ‘Warning: Heresy alert!’ which begins ‘This is, without a doubt, the single most overrated book in the English language’. Notably, the reviewer takes pains to stress his literary credentials, writing:
Mind you, I’m not some high school student forced to read this book for a class, unable to appreciate classic literature. I’m a very well-read 42 year old, who read the book on my own initiative because I felt that I wanted to make my own decision about it. I believe in speaking my mind; if I was any more complimentary about this book than I have been, I would be being intellectually dishonest.
After paragraphs of well-written, albeit angry, prose, he concludes that far from being The Great American novel, ‘For my money, that title should go to “Tom Sawyer”, but there are certainly any number of good candidates for the spot. This book is NOT one of them’.
4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Naturally, following such a glowing endorsement, I had to check out reviews of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. While not the recipient of as many one-star reviews as Moby Dick, there’s still a number of detractors. That said, I would hazard a guess that students forced to read it in school feature heavily amongst their numbers, given that many reviewers are fluent in a language I do not speak (emojis).
For example, a review titled ‘Terrible book’ states simply, ‘I hated this book!!!!!!!!!!!:p. :p :p this book is poop crap poop crap poop crap poop crap poop crap poop crap!!!!!!!! Omg why is this book so boring??????’ Likewise, in a review confusingly titled ‘Stars’, a reader presumably forced to finish the book for study purposes concludes, ‘I thought this book was not very interesting, because I could barely pay attention and finish it. It was a long story’.
However, it’s clear that some of the negative reviewers are adults, albeit ones monitoring the books their children are assigned in school. For example, presumably forgetting that it was published in 1846, in a review titled ‘Using derogatory and racial words’, the reader states, ‘I could not read it to my child, nor could /would I let her read it. The author uses using derogatory and racial slurs. This book should be banned’.
In fact, another review titled ‘Don’t like the ending, planning extreme violence’ has actually made me curious enough to want to read the book. To quote the reviewer, ‘Did not like it. Already returned it. Especially the ending which I checked early on. Tom and Huck, telling of all the people they plan to kill if they have certain problems with them’. Have they confused The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with a book about serial killers?
So what are we to conclude from this exercise? Clearly, taste is social and judgements around it are quite explicit. For the most part, reviewers are aware that they are ‘supposed’ to like the classics. Indeed, it’s worth noting that they are in the minority, given that all four books have overall ratings of close to five stars and thousands of glowing reviews. It’s also clear that some reviewers use their critical reviews as a way of asserting their discerning taste: unlike the bourgeois masses, they have formed their own opinion.
But the reviews also suggest that reviewers, presumably including those from lower-class backgrounds forced to read the books in school, don’t unquestioningly conform to dominant cultural narratives about ‘good’ books. In other words, while taste is intrinsically social, there’s a personal dimension, too. Because sometimes classics don’t live up to Don Quixote, sometimes they are just ‘poop crap poop crap poop crap’, and, as Fifty Shades of Grey has shown us, sometimes you just want a book about dicks.
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Quite frankly, I wish I had discovered the Kindle before I read the Twilight series, because it would have saved me a lot of grief.
Lincoln Michel has written extensively about this topic on his Substack Counter Craft. For example, what really is the difference between ‘urban fantasy’ and ‘magical realism’ beyond the fact that the former is considered to be genre fiction and the latter to be literary fiction? As Michel argues, they are basically a spectrum, with One Hundred Years of Solitude at one end and the Dresden Files (naturally, I have read the latter series) at the other, rather than distinct categories. Unquestionably critical to the distinction is also the class background of their readers.
Well, the content, at least. The physical condition of the book is another matter.
Well, today, at least. For the record, upon its publication in 1847, a fair amount of ire was directed at its ‘anti-Christian composition’. Still, I can’t help think that focusing on its anti-Christian message is kind of like criticising the Harry Potter films for beardism (like sexism, see, but prejudice against beards) – and who on earth would do that? (Oh, wait…)
I was intrigued by the ‘Yet’ in the title, which implies that the reviewer has spotted a veritable swathe of anti-Christian sentiment in the classics.* Unfortunately, the reviewer has only posted one other review, but, sure enough, it focuses on the anti-Christian message of another more contemporary classic: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Titled ‘This book is against Christianity’, the reviewer doesn’t even try to summarise the book’s plot, writing merely, ‘Christian parents, beware! This book speaks of the Church in a negative light and portrays it as bad. Not only is this true [sic? slip?], but it is also very vulgar. I had to read it for school, and I was very offended’.
*Kind of like a Christianity-obsessed version of Janet Gilmer, the woman who sued Disney for all the subliminal sex messaging in their films. (Apparently, it’s all innocent, but I can’t help feel that Disney doth protesteth too much.)
Is it Flannery O’Connor, who I’ve never heard of but tops Google searches of ‘literary classics o’connor’? Is it Jack O’Connor, whose Classic O’Connor features ‘several of the author’s greatest gun stories’? Or is the reviewer Irish, and fond of the short stories of Frank O’Connor? Who can know?
Still, based on my years of working at a video store, you can bet your bottom dollar that if there’s a porn version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there’s definitely a porn version of Moby Dick. (In point of fact, there appear to be dozens.)