OK, so here's the scenario: I'm in a panic. I need to buy a birthday present for a girlfriend but I'm fresh out of ideas. So I go to Amazon and look for the top reviewer. She's called Harriet Klausner. Bingo! A woman (in the terrestrial world of book reviewing they're nearly all men).
Amazon promises me honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information. Klausner tells us like it is two or three times a day. In the six years she has been reviewing for Amazon she has told it like it is more than 12,000 times.
It is at this point that the doubts begin to kick in. I mean, what sort of a human being can devour books at a rate of three a day -- and not just devour but savour and digest and then regurgitate them for the benefit of other, less voracious readers? And how many books can there be each year that are worth recommending (she never reviews books she doesn't like).
On the positive side, I fairly quickly get an idea of her taste -- fantasy, SF, chick-lit, romance, crime. That's good. My girlfriend likes froth. Like Klausner she dislikes cowboys and has no time for non-fiction.
So I do a search of her most recent reviews and arrive at Bad Idea: A Novel With Coyotes, by Todd Hafer ("terrific coming of age tale") and A Mile from Sunday, by Jo Kadlecek ("delightful chick lit Christian tale"), both filed yesterday.
Hmmmm. Klausner might tell it like it is, but what exactly is "it": how does she choose which two books a day to review? Who sends them to her? Her recommendations embrace such a huge, shifting ocean of novels that I'm beginning to feel seasick.
And there you have it: democratisation of opinion is all very well, but there is a point when it ceases to be opinion in any meaningful sense. (I doubt that my girlfriend would want to invest her precious time in either A Mile from Sunday or A Novel with Coyotes.)
I don't doubt Klausner's integrity, and I can even see how such whole-body immersion could create a sharp sense of relative quality within certain generic categories.
But it's not going to help me choose my girlfriend's birthday present. A trip to my local bookshop, to consult someone who only reads one or two books a week, is beginning to look like time well spent.
