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I Don’t Care What You Think
Why I ignore your negative comments
“Deliberately vague… lazy… a dull read”; “the worst book I’ve ever read”; “Awful. No real plot, no actual sci fi world building, no exploration, non developed characters. Just a big WHY.”
Harsh comments indeed. Klara and the Sun, it would seem, is no favourite of the skeptical Goodreads reviewer, and neither, it would equally appear, are any of Kazuo Ishiguro’s earlier works.
Never Let Me Go, a novel set in an English boarding school, was labelled “plodding, dreary and pretentious”, “a waste of time”, “overrated and depressing”. Goodreads awarded the book more than fifteen thousand one-star reviews — that’s to say, more bad reviews than most books will ever — good or bad — receive at all.
Perhaps Ishiguro does not feel so bad. After all, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, received a knighthood in 2018 and was listed, by the Times of London, as one of the fifty best British writers since 1945.
Ernest Hemingway fares little better. The Old Man and the Sea, despite being regarded as a classic of American literature, is variously labelled “boring”, “intolerable, exhausting, difficult and excruciatingly painful”, and “a book too clever for its own good”. One of its most popular reviews on Goodreads puts the mood simply:
