Bookface

Thanks to a stomach bug that I’ve been carrying around with me for a week, I spent today laid-up (yes, like a motorcycle is laid-up), out of work and in bed.

When I hadn’t been curled up in a foetal position feeling sorry for myself, I’d been looking for a fiction book to buy on Amazon.com.

Up to this point, buying non-fiction books had been easy - chances are you’d have watched a TED talk video of the author or have some clear idea of what you want out of a particular field - non-fiction books, being, as they are, more useful than they are enjoyable.

But when it comes to fiction books, it’s a damn sight more difficult, what with new writers out there and the liberties taken with the story-telling and writing (please, James Joyce, you’re not too good for punctuation).

What has made choosing a book on Amazon very hard, I realise, is the people who review the book on Amazon. Given the many hours I’ve had to myself today, I’ve decided that it takes a certain kind of person to post lengthy book reviews on websites regularly. They are the same type of people who like going for all five days of a conference and almost certainly did not have any friends in school.

While they fall in the broad category of People You Want To Punch In The Head, they can also be divided into more specialised niches, like such:

The Indiscriminate Punctuation Mark-User
Where people are less literate (i.e. at the iTunes app store), the bludgeoned-to-death punctuation mark of choice is the exclamation mark (OMG!!!! I LOvE ThiS GAmE!!!!). On Amazon, the over-usage is more restrained, but the undercurrent of hysteria is still present, like so:

or so:

Why don’t people realise that the number of repeated punctuations varies inversely with how seriously other people take you? Especially if you call yourself a ‘huge Sophie Kinsella fan’ - at which point, you’re kinda starting out with a handicap, as it is.

The Prententious Douchebag
For this chappie, everything he writes is a masterpiece he is bestowing upon the world, a new and boundless chance to prove to everyone that he is, in fact, better than everyone else.

The trademarks of such a review include starting off with an anecdote that is linked to the book by the most ludicrous and tenuous of threads and using diction that can only come from reading the New Yorker too much.

Like this guy:

WTF, dude. I don’t know how he manages to go a good 40 words before even mentioning the book, but he does, the git, just so we know that he’s been to an art museum.

It is, in essence, a grand self-masturbation, shiok sendiri blitz of image-building - all for a group of people in cyberspace that he will never meet. I would feel sorry for him, but I’m just annoyed that he’s ruined the book for me. That book could win the Booker, Neustadt and Nobel literary prizes, and I still won’t read it because this asshole has.

The Guy Who Doesn’t Get That It’s All Pretend
I’m all for plausibility as much as the next guy - unless the next guy is this fellow, who submitted this review for a science fiction novel.

He’s the kind fellow who will pick on fantasy or science fiction novels, teasing out one skein of the plot fabric like a rabid ape with a rusty fork, arguing that the novel ‘doesn’t make sense’ or ‘is unrealistic’. The science fiction genre has the word ‘fiction’ in it, jackass. It doesn’t get any more of a larger disclaimer than that. I bet he’s the sort of guy who corrects his wife’s grammar and takes the writers of The Social Network to task for inaccurate programming references.

Calm the fuck down, it’s a book.

In any case, this is really just a very long way of saying that I couldn’t find a book to buy today. Which is so unfair. How am I supposed to get by on the five unfinished books in my Kindle?