The Predictive Power of Book Reviews

I’ve become disenchanted with book reviews. At one point in my life, I think I relied upon them more. Maybe I trusted the taste and judgment of the seasoned reviewers. Now, I feel a bad review has no predictive power as to whether or not I’ll like a book. A good review actually has more weight, especially if I see a cluster of good reviews. But a bad review is a coin-flip -- I might like the book, I might not. The review often tells me little. 

I had already read “A Better Angel” by Chris Adrian by the time the Los Angeles Times review came out slamming it. All of the reviewer’s problems were not only highly idiosyncratic, but simply wrongheaded. She missed the spirit and the sense of the collection. 

Or when James Wood reviewed “Atmospheric Disturbances” in the New Yorker, I listened to his complaints about the book’s postmodern elements, recognized them for his trademark taste, and his argument backfired – instead of avoiding the book, I knew I’d love it (it ended up being one of my favorite novels of 2009.

Lastly, after Michiko Kakutani's evisceration of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City” in the New York Times, I decided to read the novel anyway. I enjoyed it a great deal. It perfectly captures the emotional state of New Yorkers after 9/11 (yes, I was there), and does so in oblique and intriguing ways (the tiger, the fog, and even the coping mechanism of pot-smoking). 

I don’t think these are isolated cases or exceptions. Rather, I think they tell me about the effect book reviews have upon me, and perhaps upon others. I think this also might tell us a bit more about the power struggle going on between internet-enabled forms of word-of-mouth (any type of ranking system on Goodreads, LibraryThing, BookSwim, message boards, bloggers, tweeters, etc.) and formal book reviews. They have an inverse relationship, it seems—as word-of-mouth finds more avenues of dissemination, book reviews tank in relevance and power. 

From a professional standpoint, tanking book reviews seem a catastrophe. I say “seem” but I really do consider it a catastrophe—book reviewers are the front line of literature, and perform a vital role, even if they do sometimes turn into the Maginot Line as literature they denounced blitzkriegs past them into the sacred halls of the canon. 

But from the pragmatic standpoint of a reader, is this really a catastrophe? But that I mean: what has more predictive power: a review, or even a group of reviews, or a poll of readers, even readers similar to me (like Netflix’s “Viewers Like You”). I keep discovering that a poll of readers like me is equally efficacious to a group of reviews at telling me whether or not I will like a book. The opposite is equally true: a poll of readers unlike me is just as unhelpful as a reviewer with different tastes in telling me whether or not I’ll like a book. 

I do know that book reviews should have more importance than merely telling me whether or not I should read a book. They also perform the critical role of judging books. But to survive in this new media landscape, book reviews need to do what only they can do: describe the book well, connect the book to current books, the canon, trends, and make insightful interpretations that many readers might have otherwise have missed. 

Their primary role is not to color it by way of their idiosyncratic reaction, because there are millions of other readers out there who can perform that same role. The role of informing the reader whether or not they should read the book has been (mostly) usurped (publishers often note this diminished role by arguing that book reviews have little effect on sales). In short: more critical interpretation, less personal opinion. 

If a reviewer hates the book, then tell me so. That’s fine. But a lot of the time, I just won’t believe you.

Comments

[Natalie]

What if a review says "If you don't like ____________ , then don't read this book"? Do you consider that helpful or unhelpful?

[Bookfox]

Sure, I think that could be helpful, because the reviewer is situating the book among other similar books. But watch out, because computers and algorthyms are getting good enough to do the same thing. In other while comparisons are helpful to the reader, book reviews hardly have an exclusive niche on comparisons. What I'm suggesting is that book reviews do their best to truly focus on things that can't be provided in the new media landscape. It's just good business sense -- don't try to compete where your competition has an edge, provide something that only you can provide.

[Kim]

I want the reviewer to have a supported opinion without giving away too much about the book. In the last year, I have read several reviews about books that told me so much of what was going on, that I lost interest in reading it.

[Bookfox]

Kim, that's a good point. Often, I dont read reviews until after I've read the book, mainly because of that problem. Any time someone else is giving me information about the book, they are revealing it in an order not created by the author, which can spoil the careful way the author might have constructed tension or mystery in the opening pages.

For that reason I also never read jacket copy.

So I suppose, Kim that your point is yet another good reason why reviews are less helpful than some kind of like-
minded poll -- becuase as good or as careful as the reviewer is, they inevitably have to reveal information about the book. I prefer to come knowing as little as possible.

[books]

at the end of the day, a book review is based largely on someone else's opinion of the book. i usually read like, 4 or 5 different reivews of the same book and sort of average it out from there. its nice to know what you will be buying.