Beyond Good and Awful: Literary Value in the Age of the Amazon Review
“It’s a basic but still weird fact about books that two people’s experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn’t seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn’t feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don’t acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true.”
I didn’t like The Great Gatsby, personally, but maybe I should try reading it again?
Notes
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