The Last Word On Nothing

I have a personal policy: never read the comments. And when my book was published last year, I quickly learned that I probably didn’t want to take note of the reader reviews at Amazon either. 

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing from readers. Nothing makes me happier than receiving a personal note from someone who found something meaningful or even life-changing in my book. A guy recently sent me a photo of himself hugging my book and I swooned. Praise like this happens with surprising regularity, and it nourishes my writerly soul.

Of course, not all feedback is positive, yet I’m genuinely interested in critical feedback that teaches me something or offers a different perspective. But Amazon reviews, well, a lot of them are something else entirely. 

Here is the summary of my customer reviews on Amazon: 

These numbers seem pretty good, right? I mean, 84 percent of reviewers give it at least 4 stars! So let’s scroll down and see those reviews. Oh cool! It begins with the top review. 

This guy found it depressing that I debunked bogus recovery methods (the book’s stated purpose), and 50 people found that review helpful. 

Two stars, wrote “Timmy Miller” — “Chapter after chapter…only to conclude that science is hard.” The two star rating aside, this one gave me a little thrill. Yay, I thought. You got my message! If I had one ambition for the book it was for readers to come away from it understanding something about the complexities of the scientific process and why it’s so difficult to get definitive answers. Maybe Timmy didn’t like my message, but I’m satisfied that he received it nonetheless.

Moving up to 3-star reviews, we find “Dangfool,” who thought my book was “Kinda boring and too technical.” “David L” also gave me 3-stars, calling it “Not so deep.” 

I have to wonder what motivates someone to leave that kind of commentary. It’s easy to understand the impulse to leave a negative review after dropping $30 on a book that’s truly terrible. But why take the time to pan a book you find merely mediocre? 

The New York Times once assigned me to review a new book that sounded really exciting. Then I read it and discovered that it was thin on research and sloppy in its execution. The author was not some snobby somebody worth punching up to, and the book wasn’t terrible enough to warrant a takedown. So I told my editor that it wasn’t worthy of a Times review, and killed the assignment. 

The thing about book writing is that even when it’s going well, it can be difficult, soul-crushing work. When someone has spent a substantial amount of time pouring their heart into a book, writing a bad review feels is like calling someone’s baby ugly. It might be true, but do you need to shout it aloud?

My favorite reviews are the ones that wink at what the reader took away. Like this one over at Goodreads, where “Katharine” wrote a review flicking to the human impulse to dismiss evidence we don’t like: “Although she presented peer-reviewed literature on the matter, I do not believe Christie Aschwanden when she says that stretching does nothing at all.”

Which gets me to the one thing crappy Amazon reviews seem to have one thing in common: the reviewer is mad the author didn’t write the book the reader had in mind. 

Consider this 1-star review of Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy, which calls it “Boring with a feminist agenda.” “This book basically just gives examples of how the penis and mating process vary across the animal kingdom, and that relatively little is known about the vagina due to male scientists not caring as much.” In fact, that’s a fairly decent overview, even if “Amazon Customer” didn’t like it. 

“Cynical Yorkshireman” gave Annalee Newitz’s book Autonomous 1-star. “Badly infected with gender identity nonsense…My copy (see attached picture) is on its way to be recycled.” Yes, the reviewer included a photo of the book in the recycling bin. Not just cynical, that Yorkshireman, but also mean.

Amazon reviewers love to ding authors for things their books never purported to be. Take, for instance, this complaint by a reviewer of one of LaWONian Ann Finkbeiner’s books. “The author may be a respected science historian, but she has clearly not put much effort into political history.” Ann says that in fact, she is “not an historian in any way, let alone a science historian.” At least that reviewer read the book.

Some guy gave my friend Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure one star, saying “I bought this book as a gift for my daughter…I know she received the book but have not heard further…Sorry I can’t be more helpful.” Apparently it didn’t occur to him that it would have been far more helpful to everybody if he had not given a star rating to a book he hadn’t read. 

It seems not everyone understands that the review is supposed to be of the actual book. Consider the person who gave Nick Harkaway’s book, The Gone Away World, a 1-star review because it arrived damaged from Amazon. 

Spare a thought for LWON’s own Richard Panek. One of his books received an Amazon review that said “It is a crap.” Which Richard found quite disappointing. “If my book is crap, I want it to be at least the crap.” 

I feel him. I’ve noticed that almost all of my negative reviews make some version of the same complaint: I came to this book hoping to find the magic secret to athletic recovery, but Christie told me that most of the things marketed to me are snake oil and that wasn’t the answer I was looking for. 

These critiques make me shake my head a little, but they don’t get under my skin. My book isn’t for everybody, and that’s ok with me. I’ve discovered that the people who do love my book are amazing. Until I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked at my reviews in a very long time, and as scanned the bad ones for examples, I found something truly delightful. In multiple cases, total strangers had jumped in to defend me from stupid reviews. In response to a 1-star review in which the reviewer said that “I would never buy this book,” someone replied to say “Kudos on literally admitting you didn’t read the book. Reported.” 

Another 1-star review that says, “This author writes well enough to pass as a scientist but is not actually a scientist,” and then instructed people to go read another book instead. To which some other kind reader replied, “I am a scientist and found this book an excellent review of the relevant material.” 

I don’t know who any of these people are, but it warms my heart to learn that there are readers who have found my book and liked it enough to defend it. Haters gonna hate, but they can’t drown out the love.

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Illustrations by Sarah Gilman. Words by Christie Aschwanden.