MentalFloss: Ever finished a mediocre novel, and wished you’d been warned to steer clear of it? To save your time, literary news website Literary Hub created a new criticism aggregator called Book Marks, Real Simple reports. That way you’ll know which books have officially been deemed worth reading (by reviewers, anyway).
The site bills itself as “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” Just like the popular movie and television rankings site, Book Marks combines professional book critics’ assessments from more than 70 online publications (The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, and NPR, to name a few). Then, it averages them into a letter grade. Readers can also express their own opinions in a comments section. MORE
Which one to start with…”Dreams From My Father”, or “The Audacity of Hope”?
Hard Choices.
I looked up H is for Hawk. I read it a couple weeks ago. The book is complete rubbish, nothing but depressing navel-gazing. The reviewers at Book Marks loved it, gushingly, endlessly, there were no negative reviews. One reviewer loved it so much she copied a few sentences into her journal. Book Marks gets a rotten tomato from me.
I read as a youth, mostly about WWII and Cowboys, but what really got me to reading was an assignment to write a paper about Steinbeck’s *the Grapes of Wrath”….Thank you Ms. Masterson…
Willy- I wanted to beat my English teacher with that book.
…. anything by Nicholas Sparks ….. Fabio novels for dweeb pajama boys
If it was written after Walter De la mare died it’s rubbish. Rubbish.
MJA …How so?…
I appreciate Amazon particularly for books. I look at the rating of course, but before I spend a few bucks and several hours on a book I want a little better understanding, and checking out one or more of the top reviews gives a pretty good perspective.
I know Bezos is an ass, but the value add and low prices of the company he built keeps me shopping there.
Forget the new fiction. Pick from the classics — Daniel Defoe, Thomas Hardy, Chekhov, for starters.
I don’t trust professional book critics, I’ve read ‘award winning’ books that have been absolute crap, especially in the sci-fi genre.
I guess I’ll just have to muddle through the way I always have.
Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard, a friend of mine tried to get me to read it years ago. I didn’t even make it off the first page. It was absolutely hack written garbage. I love Steinbeck mainly by reading it for myself and not because I had to. Ernest Hemingway can kiss my ass, I can’t stand his overrated boring writing.
The same goes for F Scott Fitzgerald. I can’t stand his writing either.
Couple observations from the comments thread here: 1) Willysgoat bringing up The Grapes of Wrath made me think of an excellent title for a book about Bill and Hillary: The Rapes and Graft
And 2)@geoff the aardvark… If you’d have actually read more than 1 page of Battlefield Earth you might have discovered that it’s one of the best science fiction novels ever written. I got a copy of it in a lot of used science fiction books I bought off Ebay. I was skeptical, what with L Ron Hubbard having been the inventor of scientology and all, but I was amazed at how remarkably good of a story it turned out to be. Well worth the read.