I need to stop looking up reviews for everything I buy
I found a funky little used bookstore in my hometown recently. It might be my new favorite. There's a big sci-fi section which has a great selection of those mass market paperbacks I love so much.
Usually on my first round through a bookstore I'll make a point not to consult the to-read list on my phone. Instead, I'll just take each title as it passes by, absent-minded and free of agenda.
So I'm carrying on this way until I pass a copy of Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer. I've been meaning to read something by Sawyer and the little blurb on the back of the book seems interesting. $6? Sounds good to me. All the stars were aligning in favor of snapping up this little fellow and riding off into the sunset.
Then that familiar bug crawled into my ear and said: is this the right entry point into Sawyer's work? What if it's been universally panned as one of his worst books? It'd be a shame for my first experience with a new author to be a poor one. I should check Goodreads.
Feeling like an addict in relapse, I scrolled down through Sawyer's page looking for Mindscan. When it didn't show up in the first page of results (sorted by rating), I began to have second thoughts. Okay, maybe I should hold out for a copy of Flashforward or Hominids, his two most popular works and therefore probably his most accessible.
As I slipped Mindscan back onto the shelf, I knew I'd messed up. That cloud on which I'd floated from book to book with sweet abandon had evaporated, burned away by the scorch of 2,822 strangers' opinions on the internet.
I may have hated that book. I may have taken it home and struggled through 50 pages before giving it up. But at least it would've been a path carved out by my own two legs (and lobes). And besides, how can I even conceive of what I like unless I've traded blows with stuff I don't? You won't find that gristle, those free radicals, in Top Ten lists.
I think that sense of wonder we feel when cracking open a new book is proportional to how much we don't know about it. Even knowing that a book is a "classic" or critical darling can be like baggage we drag from page to page, comparing expectations with reality.
So I need to stop looking up reviews for everything I buy. Okay, maybe it's worth it when looking for a vacuum cleaner, but for creative works it just steals the magic.
The same thing happens to me at record stores and while looking for a movie to watch. Hell, even in the beer aisle at the grocery store. Something in me fights that instinct to pick something just because it looks cool. The second-guesser in me bites his nails and wonders, what if...?
So I pull up Rate Your Music or Letterboxd or frickin' Beer Advocate and inevitably find a negative review that convinces me to move on.
Sad, isn't it!?
My wife is the exact opposite. She'll take ten minutes to grab books at the library and spend the next hour reading them while I sweat over SodaDrinker64's review of Revelation Space.
She simply enjoys (!!) the books, or she doesn't. She picks up new titles based on friends' recommendations and just reads them (!!). She loves artfully designed covers and will pick a book based on a hunch, lark, whim. The stack of books she takes home is an undeniable reflection of her quirks and idiosyncrasies. I could pick it out of a lineup if I needed to.
I'm still in the throes of this whole review addiction thing. I recently discovered fountain pens. My god. There are so many YouTube channels about fountain pens.
Anyway, it's a process. I do know that it feels good to wander, stumble, and leap over the madding crowd of critical consensus. That's telling me something. So I'll follow that gut feeling and see where it leads. Maybe to some really bad books. Who can say?