Why You Shouldn’t Read Book Reviews
You’re letting someone else control your knowledge
Why, oh why do we read book reviews?
Why do we contaminate the purity of our decision with an irrelevant view?
It’s funny, really, how a couple of words can deter us from reading thousands, and in turn, deprive us of knowledge that could change our lives.
I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been turned off by a book because of the reviews I read on them from others.
Recently, Sapiens (by Yuval Noah Harari) and Think Like A Freak (Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner) caught my attention. The first thing stupid me did was visit amazon and goodreads.com to read the reviews.
As I read more of the reviews, the excitement I once held slowly eroded into disappointment and doubt. Were these books as good as people said? Because apparently not:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with these reviews. In fact, I respect these gentlemen for trying to caution others with some personal insight.
Personally, I’ve always been more concerned with critical reviews because I have trust issues with the good ones. Like, what if they’re online bot reviews being used as a devious marketing ploy. (Am I the only one?)
