Don't Even Get Me Started on the Da Vinci Code....

 

You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.   -- John Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

I tried to carefully arrange my thoughts here. The last thing I want is to seem as though I'm complaining on an old subject. I'm just thinking. Out loud. 

And those thoughts are...

Opinions.

Opinions and how we're all entitled to them. And how they can send a writer soaring to the heavens or they can kind of hurt. Ah...but we should never give them the power make us or break us. 

So to the point I go.

I just read a couple of reviews of a book that I had read. What got to me was not whether the reviewers liked or disliked the book. Hey, do you like every book you read? Oh, hell, no, you don't. 

What did strike me was that some of the evaluations were based on what the reviewers felt should have been. You know, things that should have been added to make them like the book more. Things that were in the book that made them like it less. 

Aha!

You think I'm going to go on a rant about reviews, don't you? Well, I'm not. I love reviews. I love good ones. I even love bad ones. Yes, I do. Why? Because, good or bad, it means my work is being read.

E. A. Bucchiniari said, You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.

So, for someone to read my book and to honor me with feedback, good or bad, is a big deal.

But, back to the book I had recently read. And its reviews. 

I read that same book that all the other reviewers had read.  I loved the book. The writing was stellar, beautiful, passionate. I did not even notice, for an iota of a second, the shortcomings that some of the reviewers had cited. To me, the work was perfect. It was unconventional, bold, refusing to concede to popular codes just to be accepted. It was what it was and it was fabulous.

And that is my point. Can you see it? How opinion really is just that---opinion.

A bad opinion of a book does not make it a bad book. 

How about some examples?

I've seen some awful reviews on some of my most beloved books. Books I adore, books I have read over and over, books I wish I'd written because they are so damn good.

Salman Rushdie said this of "The Da Vinci Code", Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.

Of "Wuthering Heights", George R. Graham had this to say, How a human being could have attempted such a book [Wuthering Heights] as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.

 It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards, complained Thomas Wentworth Higginson about "Leaves of Grass."

And, again, on "Wuthering Heights", the North British Review made this prediction in 1847,  Here, all the faults of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.

Mark Twain hated one of the Brontes' writing so much he claimed to want to hit her over the head with her own shinbone. Ouch. 

Yes! Ouch! Ouch! A thousand time OUCH! 

Ahem. So there.

And that is only the beginning.  So many citations from readers who absolutely hated certain books and yet...alas!...demeaned books went on to literary immortality in spite of those who did not cotton to them. 

Steve Maraboli says, I am self-propelled; fueled from within. I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m not attached to them. I learned a long time ago that if I give them the power to feed me, I also give them the power to starve me.

I must emphasise that my thoughts today aren't only as an author but as a reader.

And my biggest point is, somewhere lost in all my rambling: books are written to the tune of an author's heart. They are not written to the expectations of those who have expectations for what they read. They should never, never, never be written in hopes of meeting anyone's preconceived notions. And readers should not evaluate what they read on such expectations.

I, personally, have found myself at times trying to streamline my writing process by putting out what I think will meet popular expectations. Bad, bad, bad. For one thing, my individuality just plain won't let me do it. Epic fail for me. 

I don't know if readers having expectations on books is a good or bad thing.

All I do know is that it's dangerous for an author's artistic soul to try to meet expectations. To force their characters into preconceived molds. To sell, sell to those expectations at the cost to the integrity of the book. 

Expectations. A good word, really it is.

But...