Thursday, December 03, 2009

Amazon reviews as satire

Apropos of the previous post on 'Home Energy Saving' and the useless book I got from Amazon on the subject, Roy Simpson writes:

"Your Amazon review is now in a "side by side" contest with the most favourable review (currently only the two). Both on the same page - I hadn't seen Amazon reviews like this before."

Wayne Redhart who wrote the first review is a real hoot. He's got himself Amazon top-reviewer status by purporting to order the most unbelievable crap then writing subtly-satirical reviews which seem to praise them to the skies.

His reviews are here, but be warned, some of the stuff is so disgusting that I don't want to even mention them. Sheltered life that I lead, I couldn't begin to believe there really are published books on this topic, or this or this?

Naturally he's got the top voter ratings on each of the above from his posse of enthusiastic fans.

I also enjoyed his 'Beatles' review (Postcards from the Boys) which is a triumph of the surreal and his rant against Polanski (The Pianist - towards the bottom of the page). Great stuff.
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Roy continues:

"Doesn't the OU also offer a "Creative Writing" course? Maybe that's another to sign up for ... or maybe you could write a story about a local Creative Writing class ...? "

I'm hoping if and when we make our move to Wells there might be a local writing group. The OU does courses on creative writing and they look good. You're exercised in the arts of first, second and third person stances; descriptive vs. character vs. plot-based narrative development and all the other elements of the author's toolkit.

I don't knock it at all but there are only so many hours. The maths course, which starts in February is my main priority and of course every now and then a contract comes along and I have to earn some proper money!