Those Amazon ratings

See, if I could get on Wikipedia for just one thing today, it would be to find out the exact day that Amazon went live, a la Skynet, for purposes of this post, though I'm not entirely sure I would use that found fact at all, actually. And THAT was my best run-on sentence ever, Bob, ever!

What I wanted to impart about Amazon was this:

Often when I see a book I think I want, I am completely powerless in being drawn to the Amazon reader reviews and, more specifically, the one-star reviews. Like, I can read glowing stuff about, say, Gary Shteyngart, and think, well, okay, maybe I will - but then I make sure I read the one-stars, where, for the most part, those sensible cynics who declare, with utter certitude, certain books to be "complete waste[s] of time," or "poor" or "worst book I have read in a long time" hold sway.

That last above is from one of the two one-stars listed for This Book Will Save Your Life, by A.M. Homes, which I got from Alibris six years ago and just opened yesterday. I think it's pretty good, like a less-affected Bruce Wagner California hodgepodge/idyll. But those one-stars! There are only two, compared to a whopping twenty-one five-stars (composite ranking is four). But now, even as I am enjoying this thing well enough, I wonder if my attention will drift, thinking in the back of my mind "eh, those one-stars were right, this is drivel..."

Will let you know!

Anyway, it's pretty breezy so I will likely finish it and, when my spirits flag, I will glance again at John Waters's* advance blurb that made me chuckle:

A scarily human, kind and alarming epic of second chances. If Oprah
went insane, this might be her favorite book.

* his prose is acres better than his movies - fact!