From the Salmon

So earlier this month, Time put together a list of the top 100 novels from 1923 to the present. I’ve only read like 22 of them, so I don’t have too much to say about it. Other people, though… they’ve got plenty to say.

Proving that one magazine’s list is another man’s opportunity, Matthew Baldwin delves deep into the Amazon.com reader reviews and comes up with one-star reviews for the best novels of the past 80 years. Here is a sampling…

For instance, Time liked C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. An Amazon.com reviewer? Well…

I bought these books to have something nice to read to my grandkids. I had to stop, however, because the books are nothing more than advertisements for “Turkish Delight,” a candy popular in the U.K. The whole point of buying books for my grandkids was to give them a break from advertising, and here (throughout) are ads for this “Turkish Delight”! How much money is this Mr. Lewis getting from the Cadbury’s chocolate company anyway? This man must be laughing to the bank.

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is one of the many that I haven’t read.  But maybe I’ll skip it, since this reviewer thinks it’s the kind of thing that I probably wouldn’t like, if I’m the kind of person who wouldn’t like books like this…

Go tell it on the mountain was an extremely frustrating book. While the themes and some of the events were good (i.e., racism, abuse, religion), the way it was written made the book unenjoyable for me. I found that the way the book was written made it this way for others as well. I don’t think this is just a coincidence. If the book was written differently I probably would have found it enjoyable.

How about Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath?

While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.

Actually, that seems about right to me. Dirt and that #&%*$ turtle!

Okay, one more and then you should just go let Mr. Baldwin tell you about the rest of them, since he did the searching and all.

But I can’t pass up this beauty about one of my favorite books of all time, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five…

In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo with a former movie star by the name of Montana Wildhack. I thought that the very concept of a man who was kidnapped by aliens was truly unbelievable and a tad ludicrous. I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible. While some of the Tralfamadorians concept of death and living in a moment would be comforting for a war veteran, I found it relatively odd. I do not believe that an alien can kidnap someone and house them in a zoo for years at a time, while it is only a microsecond on earth. I also do not believe that a person has seven parents.

Whoa. There’s a person that probably shouldn’t read Animal Farm.

Or even The Cat in the Hat.