> Room and The Road — two novels about single parents in difficult circumstances...
Early contender for understatement of the year.
One experiment I've been trying out for the past year or so is only reading "old" novels (first published more than 25 years ago). That comes from the recognition that I only have so much time for reading, and 0-5 years after first publication is generally not enough time to determine if a book is a true classic, or just part of a passing fad. Talking to other people about critically acclaimed contemporary novels is not really something I do, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by only reading old books.
I'd care about a Rotten Tomatoes for books, if there were one. Because I can't make sense of Goodreads' ratings: it seems the entire useful range is compressed somewhere between 4.0 and 4.3, but at the same time quite a lot of books randomly have too low or too high ratings.
IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes also have weird useful ranges, but they are consistent: on IMDB, 6 is very meh, 8 is hella good, 9 is genius. On RT, 70% is borderline rubbish, best to choose something above 80%.
Also, it's pretty clear that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is anywhere near 4 only due to the political theme.
Atlas shrugged is awful, from a literary-critical point of view. The prose is thin at best. The narrative is hamfistedly didactic, at best. It's barely even a novel in the sense intended by novelists (or readers of novels, broadly). It's a weird example. Judged only by its artistic merits it would be down there with cheap genre fiction or bad soap romance as essentially political porn. Probably not a great litmus test.
The distinction of aesthetical merit and other notability works for me with movies. I watch a meh film if it's of special interest for me, but I know what I'm in for (unless I choose not to spoil it). Also I don't really need a ratings site for such works, since I'll hear of them anyway.
However, now that I think of it, more books are read for reasons other than entertainment and aesthetics. In fact, for nonfiction books I'd prefer a different rating: an inverse of bullshit-o-meter. Might still be doable with a critic-ratings aggregator, especially in highly subjective cases like ‘Atlas.’
I think I agree with you, but just to make sure it is said;
Based on Atlas Shrugged; Ayn Rand was a terrible writer. There was no reason whatsoever to read that book apart from its political message. It wouldn't rate an entry in the database let alone a star rating. It was still well worth reading because it is the only representative of that political message out there. If someone is going to take to take that message to heart Atlas Shrugged may well be the only place to find it in the readily available canon.
I finally have to say it: Thelema is almost the same thing, except Crowley wrote better and had a soul. But he didn't get to ride a red scare and drove normies away with the mysticism.
I'm yet to put in my proper dose of hair-splitting research of the classics, but I feel like Nietzschean themes don't vary too much over the years and movements.
How useful you find the ratings on sites like that really depends on how close your taste is to that of its reviewers on average.
In my own case the IMDB Top 250 list is about 50/50 hit or miss. I strongly disagree with many of the high ratings for "classic" and "great" movies on that site and many others. But apparently many other viewers love that stuff and hate many of the movies I love. So my taste is pretty different from theirs.
Even when I find people with tastes close to mine there are still movies we strongly disagree on. There used to be a website called YMDB which let you enter in your top 20 favorite movies and would match you with people who had similar lists. That was a very useful site for finding new movies to watch, but even when I'd find people with lots of my favorite movies on their lists, they'd still tend to have some movies which I absolutely hated on there too.
So it's very hard to find people who's tastes are absolutely identical and whose judgment in films, books, or whatever you can absolutely rely on. But if their tastes are close to yours then the likelihood of them recommending something you'd like increases compared to some random review site like IMDB, Amazon, Goodreads, Rotton Tomatoes, or whatever.
This is why I really pay absoultely no attention to the Oscars, Pulitzer Prizes, and other awards. They're popularity contests among people whose tastes I don't share or trust. The winners might as well be random.
I much more value of the opinion of a trusted friend whose tastes I share.
Something else that's useful is subreddits on small, obscure genres of literature I like and blogs on obscure authors I like. The more obscure the better, as the usefulness of such sites tend to decrease the more popular the subject matter is and the more people contribute to them. Then the law of averages kicks in and the odds of getting poor recommendations increases.
I wouldn't unless they were administered an IQ test first. Pretty sure I wouldn't like the Davinci code or Harry freaking Potter (the fundamentalists were right about this stealing the souls of those who read it). For example, from the OP link:
I used to subscribe to the New Criterion to read book reviews of ... actually intelligent books that were picked for something resembling literary merit. Even that kind of faded away; now finding good books is basically Samizdat.
I used to find Amazon was good, the people who bought this also bought..., now though there are too many people not like me there I guess. It used to be book people as a guess, now it seems pretty random.
I have found a new method - going to a bookshop :-). There's a specialist book shop near me that really is into the same books as me, it works a treat. The unfortunate part is I have to buy paper books again, but oh well, thats still nice, particularly since the prices on kindle don't seem to be very different any more either.
The Booker is interesting because it's a big deal in the UK, and winning does seem to make a big difference to sales. But the long listed books don't sell many copies - usually fewer than 10,000.
I start by buying the winners and the short-listed books, then you look at other books written by / illustrated by those people. There are some excellent children's books today. I mentioned this (some time ago) on HN and someone created this lovely website, in German, to help people find great children's books published in German. https://www.schoene-kinderbuecher.de/
> to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him. And to receive a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one is being paid for it.
Early contender for understatement of the year.
One experiment I've been trying out for the past year or so is only reading "old" novels (first published more than 25 years ago). That comes from the recognition that I only have so much time for reading, and 0-5 years after first publication is generally not enough time to determine if a book is a true classic, or just part of a passing fad. Talking to other people about critically acclaimed contemporary novels is not really something I do, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by only reading old books.