Everyone's a Critic

Like many of you out there, I'm on Goodreads. I love tracking the books I've read and having a place to keep a list of the books I want to read.

A lot of my Goodreads peeps write long, thoughtful reviews of the books they read. I love reading their intelligent analyses because many times my friends' reviews will help me decide what books to read in the future.

I am not someone who writes thoughtful reviews on Goodreads.

Most of the time I simply rate the books I've read by giving them somewhere between 1 and 5 stars and then continuing about my merry way.

Occasionally, however, I will write some sort of pithy commentary. But I assure you, very few people are using my unintelligent reviews to influence their future literary choices. Here are some examples of reviews I've written.

Requiem, by Lauren Oliver: Lauren Oliver, why must you murder all your books with TERRIBLE ENDINGS?!? Jesus.

Devotion: A Memoir, by Dani Shapiro: An excellent combination of being both boring and pointless. Plus, her transliterations from Hebrew to English are terrible.

The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling: Terrible. I can't even. 

The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin: Why is everyone obsessed with this book? I don't get it. Womp.

Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer: Fool me once, Jonathan Safran Foer, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I don't know why I thought I would like this seeing as I hated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but this just goes to show that I'm a moron and didn't learn my lesson the first time around. WOMP WOMP TO ME. 

The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin: This is a pathetic book about some pathetic people. 

Until I Find You, by John Irving: THIS BOOK IS SO LONG WHY IS IT SO LONG 

Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert: I didn't hate her in this one as much as I did in Eat, Pray, Love. So I guess that's a win. 

And finally, the piece of writing that I may very well be most proud of in my entire life, my review of Fire, by Kristin Cashore: This book, to quote a guy who lived on my floor in college, "sucks like a big bag of assholes."

It is painfully boring. It takes a huge feat of craptitude for me to abandon a book, but 60% of the way through and I can officially read no more. There were MAYBE 10 pages of the whole thing thus far that actually had any integration with Graceling (which I really liked), and while I really wanted to see more of that, I just can't wait around forever.

Finally, I don't understand why Cashore deems it necessary to talk about periods so much. If I wanted to read so much about periods I would go read "Our Bodies, Ourselves." 

Are you on Goodreads? Let's be friends! Maybe you write reviews that are a little more well thought-out than mine.