Amazon Customer Review Review

Almost all the books I buy are from Amazon. There are always a bunch of people selling ‘used’ copies of the books for really low prices and I remember purchasing some for as low as 1 cent (of course the shipping and handling at 3.99 is where they make the money). The approximate average amount that I have spent on a book cannot be more than 10$. My point being that this is a great place to buy books cheaply. The only downside to this is the 4-5 day wait for the book to arrive.

Also, I recently formed a very entertaining habit. Once I am done reading something (and most of it is very basic literature made famous by the world long ago that I am catching up with) I read a lot of the customer reviews that are posted on Amazon. The spectrum of reactions to any book is fascinating and I am always amazed by both the depth and shallowness displayed. 5 star reviews of the well-acclaimed books are generally informative and help me either look at the book from an angle that I had failed to see or realize the importance of details that I had missed. However, it is the 1 star reviews of these ‘good’ books that sometimes force me to put on an entirely different set of reading glasses. I had expected most of these bad reviews to be from ‘philistines’ who would crib along the lines of “this books sucks...I got so bored” or such intellectually equivalent arguments. This tends to be true in most cases. People seem to harp on a minor issue and reject the book as being bad after making a mountain out of the mole hill. Sometimes they even attack the motives of the author as being suspect and claim that their distrust and prejudice makes them hate the literary work. As frivolous as some opinions might be I found that there are always a few people who have a legitimate point or two. It is obviously a good idea to read even the minority view and form a more balanced opinion.

One of the most compelling revelations I had came to me when I was reading the reviews for George Orwell's 1984. When I finished this book recently (I know I am late to the party) I immediately thought of its present day relevance in terms of the wire-taps/illegal prisons/etc happening in the US being perpetuated by the far-right in the name of war. Only when I read the reviews did I realize that there was a sea of people who interpreted the book's modern day relevance in terms of the far-left agenda of making American society more and more socialist. Although 1984 talks about a totalitarian regime that incorporates the extreme nature of both the left and the right, it was interesting for me to see my own and other's prejudices (no matter how justified) heavily influencing what we took away from the book.