My Dream Review

I only write reviews for books I really enjoy reading. I don't write negative reviews for many reasons: First, I figure I've already wasted my time reading the book, so why waste more time writing a review for it. Second, I don't see the need to put any negative energy out there. Third, there are a lot of books I enjoy that others don't, so if I don't like a book, it doesn't mean it's a bad book. Fourth, the thing that annoys me more than anything when reading a book is finding too many mistakes in it, in which case I often write to the author and offer to edit it, if, and only if, I find it worthy of being read. Fifth, maybe the author's work has improved since writing that particular book, or maybe I picked that author's worst work, and there is no need to humiliate or badmouth them at the time I've gotten to reading their book.

A while back, I read a nonfiction book that I found... what's the word for it... HORRIBLE. By the time I finished it, I was angry, not just at the author for putting together all that crap, but also with myself for continuing to read it when I sensed I shouldn't waste my time around page 80. I was hoping the good stuff would come later, I suppose. I don't know. Anyway, seven hundred pages later, I hadn't learned anything except a few acronyms. For a minute, I even thought the author should be sued for wasting people's time. I didn't write a bad review, but I looked at the reviews, only after the fact, and discovered thousands of positive reviews. I was shocked.

I still don't know exactly how reviews work, and I know some people get paid to write reviews, which I find immoral, but I couldn't understand how thousands of people may have liked this book. Had they read it? Had they actually learned something from it? I decided to get over it, so I took a deep breath and went to my bookcase to take a book I knew wouldn't disappoint just to cheer up. I have a few go-to books for times like this. This time, I chose The Awful Truth about the Sushing Prize by Marco Ocram. Soon I forgot all about the bad experience with the nonfiction, or so I thought.

This happened a couple of months ago. Fast forward to last night when thunder scared my pups and I couldn't get much sleep. During the short time I did sleep after the thunder was over, I dreamed that I was in a bookshop and I was venting about the seven-hundred-page nonfiction to a fellow book lover looking at some nonfiction books. I gave a full review for that book, stating, in great detail, everything that was wrong with it. In my dream, I was speaking fast and angrily. When I woke up, my first thought was, This is new. It was my first “dream” review. I guess there is a first time for everything. At least, I got it out of my system, hopefully for good. I'm grateful I hadn't paid for that book. I had borrowed it online, through Overdrive, from the library.

This experience taught me that book reviews don't really mean anything. I know most people decide what to read based on reviews. I don't. I like friends' recommendations, and that is friends whom I know well and who know me well. I also take recommendations from people whose intellect I admire. For nonfiction, I also often look at the table of contents, and if the topic is something I'm interested in, I read it, hoping to learn something.

What still bothers me is that book reviews affect book sales. I can't help but wonder what happens to new writers who are not known and don't get many reviews. Whether they publish their book themselves or go the traditional way, they face many more challenges than authors who are already famous, at least in terms of sales.

I remember a story I once read in a French magazine, a few decades ago, about a few university students who had typed a certain well-known author's book word for word, sent the "manuscript" to many publishers, and gotten rejection after rejection from every single publisher. Meanwhile, the actual book was selling like hotcakes in stores all over the world. Those students proved an important point. Back then, every writer had only the traditional publishing option. Nowadays, thankfully, writers have the choice to publish their work through Amazon. As readers and writers, we have an obligation to write reviews, at the very least for good books.