Let’s Review
An honest review of reviews
Reviews are an interesting form of literature. In some ways, the medium of reviews has became more hallowed and pretentious than ever, while also being one of the few things that feel democratized by the internet. In the grand tradition of Working Through It, I read a review the other day that made me minorly disgruntled, so here I am with a 1,000 word review of reviews. Let’s begin, shall we?
Sometime last year I started reviewing every book and movie I read or watched. It’s not something I await with baited breath, but I usually take the time to update my Goodreads or my Letterboxd account with the random thoughts that enter my head after I finish a book or a film. Perhaps it was a need to see the fun little numbers on the various year end reviews / Spotify wrapped approximates from each platform or perhaps it just means I have too much time on my hands.
P.S. I wrote about the Wrapped-ification of things earlier this year and have already made my begrudging peace with the concept. Check it out below!
Regardless, part of my reviewing process is seeing what other people think of whatever I’m reviewing. The bulk of reviews on these big sites come from normal people who write a sentence or two. Every now and then you’ll see a journalist or celebrity reviewing something, but for the most part, these sorts of review sites are made up of ordinary internet dwellers. Yet anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows that the people who use the internet are … strange. Yeah, that’s the right term, strange.
With the strangeness of humanity in mind, I’ve found that online reviews generally fall into three categories: helpful, funny, and awful-why-would-you-think-that. Yet to my cosmic horror and surprise, I think I’ve also discovered a secret fourth category called did-you-even-watch-this?
The astute among you might point out that this new category could very much fit into the awful-why-would-you-think-that category – the astute among you are probably right, but sometimes online reviews are so mind-warpingly awful that it feels like the person saw the movie from an alternate timeline. Simply put: there’s badly written reviews and then there’s badly written reviews.
There’s a tendency to see the reviewers who make these awful reviews as people with poor media literacy – at least I’m sure that’s what someone on Twitter would say. I’m not sure if I fully agree with that or not, but look up the one star reviews of your favourite book or movie and these people are everywhere.
Lately I’ve been seeing these sorts of bad reviews being left by people complaining about the politicization of non-fiction books. I recently read two wildly different books: Dust by Jay Owens, a lengthy examination of dust and all the tiny particles that play a role in the world’s ecosystem, and The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt, a compacted history of female animators in Disney’s animation studios.
Each of these books are decently dense non-fiction novels that overlap the boundaries between narrative non-fiction, reported journalism, and historical reporting. Yet for some reason both titles had reviews that amounted to “this book is good, but I wish the author didn’t shove her left-wing politics into the book, it was fine without it.” In essence, some readers want the historical story, but balk at the politics displayed by the writers in telling the story.
So let me get this clear, these people want a book without politics that covers – checks notes – climate policy and gender equality, while also being a history book (which is might literally be the thing that politics decides) Look, authors can decide to put whatever they like in books, which you can then choose not to read if you like, but I’m also pretty sure that expecting books about climate change and gender equality to be politically neutral is as asinine a request as I’ve ever heard. As much as I could rant about fundamental requirement for politics in fiction and non-fiction alike, this is just one example of how modern reviews work – or rather don’t work.
Wherever you look, everyone has an opinion. You can’t really escape it, nor do I really think that’s a bad thing. Amazon reviews are generally helpful (if they’re real), as are TripAdvisor reviews. They’re not great on specifics, but for things with some objective standards, they can be a decent general indicator of quality. Subjective things fare much worse.
First off, the platforms we use for reviews vary in quality. For instance, the movie review site/app Letterboxd is generally decent. There’s probably some quality-of-life improvements that could be made, but it generally works.
Goodreads, the aforementioned book reviewing site, is the worst app I have ever had the displeasure of using. The website itself seems to be lost in the 2000s, while the mobile app may as well be a fancy crash simulator. The service itself is glorified web wrapper for a big database, so I wish there was some sort of company with a huge amount of server experience that could step in and make sure it runs well. If only we could get a company like Amazon on the scene – oh wait, they’ve owned it since 2013? If Goodreads were some scrappy startup I might forgive them, but the service has been owned for over a decade by one of the largest internet companies on the planet, so you’d think that they would have improved it by now.
I digress.
Aside from the user experience of either service, there’s a weird aura that surrounds user reviews. Some are innocuous problems, like Letterboxd fans bemoaning the death of the serious review in favour of cheap jokes (as if that hasn’t been happening to discourse for centuries), while others are more serious ones, like the practice of review bombing on Goodreads1, which can tank (often progressively leaning) books before they even launch, simply on strength of negative reviews alone.
There has been much said and written about the outsized effect of reviews on the people who make the creative projects we consume, particularly Goodreads, and I’m not really sure what to make of it. Reviews are everywhere you look, and it’s not just limited to the traditional things either. Everything that has a like button is essentially asking for a review: podcasts, games, YouTube videos, social media posts, TikTok’s – all of it vying for attention and our likes. Whether it’s trying to give us custom recommendations or become the ultimate arbiter of quality on the internet, these review algorithms give us a muddled aggregate of amorphous criticism that ultimately means nothing – yet means everything to the people who make things.
To quote the Romans: de gustibus non est disputandum. There’s no accounting for taste. I give reviews three stars.
Side note: I love one of the quotes from the article talking about how universally hated the Goodreads interface is: “I also think aesthetically the platform is very unattractive and has kind of a Dell computer vibe when we’re living in an Apple universe.” Perhaps slightly elitest, but also very funny.