Wacky Amazon reviews

There's nothing quite as fun as the Amazon reviews on an even slightly controversial book. Here's a particularly good example. One K. Leyendecker, from (surprise) Texas, has copy-and-pasted the same review onto five books for children which involve homosexuality. Apparently 'Gos' (God's brother with the speech impediment?) doesn't like the gays. Funnily enough, one of the books has another negative review, from a lesbian couple who liked the pictures, but were unimpressed with the storyline.

Also amusing are the reviews on Colleen McCullough's historical novels about the late Roman Republic. Because all the negative ones are entirely at cross-purposes. "This book has naughty words in it" sits beside "There's far too much boring history in this; more sex please", "There are no admirable characters" (why is this a flaw?) sits beside "she's obsessed with Caesar", "If you want accurate historical novels about Rome, read Graves" (eh?) sits beside "It's too precise; I prefer Graves, with all his inaccuracy" (quite right; I Claudius is great but largely made up) and so on and so forth. A few people are also offended by the extreme length of the books; generally about 800 pages. It's really quite strange; the vast majority of the reviews are very positive, but there are people who seem to consider the things patently unreadable.

I love this:

I'm fairly certain she included every single Roman name ever found in any ancient document anywhere, and since this is Rome, they're all pretty much the same. You're constantly having to either turn back the page to try to remember who the ten dozen people mentioned on this page are, or simply skimming over it, assuming (usually correctly) that they are utterly irrelevant to the basic story.

Highly recommended, by the way, if you're the sort of person who isn't scared of 800 page books about people with similar names backstabbing (figuratively and occasionally literally) each other. I Claudius is shorter, but contains more incest and mad great-aunts.