Everything Is Overrated

Maybe… maybe… maybe… To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated, but I’m not ready to commit yet.

“The Fault in Our Stars (by John Green) was really overrated,” a co-worker of mine said a couple days ago.  She reads and knows that I read, and we both have kids who read, so all of us have read some of the same books.

“It wasn’t meant for us,” I said to my co-worker.  I’m in my late 40s, and she’s in her mid-30s, and the book was written for high school kids.  Most YA literature is unreadable, so I consider The Fault in Our Stars a decent book just because I finished it, and it has a pretty good ending.

“But it got a bunch of 5 star reviews on Amazon!” she said.  “Maybe it was 3 and 1/2 stars, maaaaybe 4, but 5?  No!”

“Everything gets 5 star reviews on Amazon,” I said.  “If a book hasn’t received a 5 star review, it means it hasn’t been reviewed.”

“Then everything on Amazon is overrated,” she said.

My co-worker is probably right.  Most books on Amazon get a lot of 5 star reviews. I don’t think any book deserves 5 stars.  I haven’t read a 5 star book in… uh… I don’t think there is a 5 star book.  A 5 star book should be like a 10 in gymnastics; maybe it’s possible, but it should be rare.  The good thing about gymnastics is that at least they can use decimals.  If Amazon could use decimals, a bunch of 5 stars would be 4.7 stars, which might not change the average, but there wouldn’t be so many underserving 5s.  Instead, they’d be undeserving 4.7s.

But there are other ways books can be overrated.

If a book is a best-seller, it’s probably overrated.  A book that sells millions of copies usually isn’t that much better than a book that sells thousands.  I’m just as likely to quit reading a best-seller as I am a book that’s obscure.  I’ve finished a few best-sellers recently.  I enjoyed Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  It’s a good book.  But it’s not much better than other books I’ve finished that weren’t best-sellers.  It’s good, but it’s probably overrated.

At least Gone Girl was kind of original.  Most bestsellers are written by authors who have written a bunch of other bestsellers, and their latest bestsellers are a lot like their previous bestsellers.  If you’ve read one John Sandford or Janet Evanovich (a bunch of other names could be included on the list) book, you’ve read a bunch of books by John Sandford or Janet Evanovich.  The authors deserve credit for building a loyal audience, but those individual bestselling books are overrated.

Books that win awards are automatically overrated too.  I haven’t finished many books that win awards, so maybe I’m not the best judge of whether award-winning books are overrated.  I’m not the award-winning author’s target audience either.  I finished the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction from a few years ago, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.  I enjoyed it, which means that it probably shouldn’t have won a Pulitzer.  I appreciated it a lot more than other readers who routinely finish Pulitzer Prize books (winners and runners-ups and books that they claim should have been nominated but weren’t).  A Visit from the Goon Squad is overrated.  It’s good, but the Pulitzer Prize automatically makes it overrated.

Even classics are overrated.  Some critics may disagree, claiming that any piece of literature that survives generation after generation of readers cannot be overrated.  I have a tough time believing that Moby Dick was that much better than other literature of its time period that has been long forgotten.  At least, I hope it’s not that much better.  Otherwise, I feel really sorry for book readers back in 1850.  Moby Dick is a classic because somewhere along the way, it was overrated and the powers that be who choose what others should read decided that it would be a classic.  Without literature professors and super-aggressive high school English teachers, Moby Dick and a bunch of other classics would have been long forgotten because they’re all overrated.

It’s easy to pick on Moby Dick because Moby Dick is Moby Dick.  It’s not controversial to say that classics like Moby Dick are overrated.  I was going to say something a little more recent and a lot more beloved like To Kill a Mockingbird was overrated, but I might not be ready for that yet.  I don’t know if I want to be that controversial.  People look at you crazy if you say To Kill a Mockingbird is overrated, and I don’t like it when people look at me crazy.

There are a lot of books out there that people haven’t heard of.  If nobody knows about something, then it can’t be overrated.  But it has the potential to be overrated.  The books that people have heard of aren’t that much better than the books that nobody has heard of.  But as soon as an unknown book or author becomes well-known, then that book and author have become overrated.

Maybe one day I’ll be overrated too.