You hit me with a flower

One-star reviews such as:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"So many other good books... don't waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed."

...always remind me of the 'Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Museum' from Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, pictured above. (I have a first edition -- Putnam, 1977 -- sitting in storage with the rest of my books.) In addition to his many other talents, Steve Martin may have predicted the internet.

Now, more seriously, Time's Lev Grossman has examined the phenomenon of "it sucks / it rocks" reader reviews in depth:

It's a basic but still weird fact about books that two people's experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn't seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn't feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don't acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true...

Grossman concludes:

I feel like there should be more talk about the criteria by which we make literary judgments. More and more books are being published every year, but we have less of an idea than ever (what with aesthetics being dead, or at least resting) how to filter and sort and organize and canonize them, or even whether we should.

The full article is here.

The human facility and stuff

Patricia Cohen has a piece in the NYT about evolutionary theory and reading. Expect to be really bored by the subject at a dinner table near you, and soon, although it's a step forward from being lectured about evolutionary theory and the market, or how Monet only painted that way because he had cataracts. Anyways, the Professor of English is fantastically called Lisa Zunshine:

Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality.

Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating, Ms. Zunshine suggested. Do I think he is attracted to her or me? Whatever the root cause, Ms. Zunshine argues, people find the interaction of three minds compelling. “If I have some ideological agenda,” she said, “I would try to construct a narrative that involved a triangularization of minds, because that is something we find particularly satisfying.”

NB: Virginia Woolf is also challenging because she's a bit depressing. Still: Ms. Zunshine.