Book Review Aggregator

January 3, 2005 12:23 PM

Metacritic Books. Metacritic has been covering reviews for movies, music, and games for years, but now has started aggregating books reviews, with about 150 books so far.
posted by driveler (13 comments total)

I really like the redesign. Nice work MeCri!
posted by gwint at 12:39 PM on January 3, 2005

Cool, I like how I can resort the page without it needing a reload.

I was really hoping they'd implement this feature, as I don't have several weeks to get through the New York Review of Books. Maybe this has more to do with the fact that more books are published than movies, but I wasn't as able to catch if a book was good or bad as easily as I am able to tell if a movie is good or bad. They may have to revamp their system or tweak it.
posted by geoff. at 12:57 PM on January 3, 2005

I checked it out the other day because I was curious to see how many of the various Kakutanis running the American book-reviewing racket gleefully savaged poor Tom Wolfe's new novel.
Not surprisingly, they all piled in.
posted by matteo at 1:12 PM on January 3, 2005

When Rotten Tomatoes first came to be, I really wanted to a version for books. Now I've got one!
posted by painquale at 2:47 PM on January 3, 2005

Nice, although there's something mildly unsettling about reducing that many words to two-digit numbers. Also, in the movie reviews, I've noticed that MC is often assigning numbers that don't really reflect the review. If something's generally overrated, even the bad reviews will wind up with high scores etc. Guess it's in inexact science....
posted by muckster at 2:49 PM on January 3, 2005

I checked it out the other day because I was curious to see how many of the various Kakutanis running the American book-reviewing racket gleefully savaged poor Tom Wolfe's new novel.

I have that book sitting on my desk next to me right now, and I was honestly thinking to myself before logging on, "I wish MetaFilter would give me a flimsy excuse to make a post about how criminally underrated this book is." Lo and behold, I got my wish.

I think many of the critics who are bashing the book for its lack of "accuracy" are confusing accuracy with realism. I am Charlotte Simmons isn't at all realistic (Wolfe's novels never are), but it is accurate. It's also laugh-out-loud funny--he has this way of structuring his chapters so that they have about three or four different series of running jokes, all of which come to a climax in the last page or two.

I believe it's 60% off at Amazon right now (they must have pallets full of it sitting in their warehouses).
posted by Prospero at 4:16 PM on January 3, 2005

Is "Metacritic" really an accurate name, since all it does is aggregate review scores? You'd think that to qualify as metacriticism, the site would actually review the reviews. "Mr. Maltin has clearly overstepped his experience here. Two stars out of five."
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:50 PM on January 3, 2005

You may be on to something, Faint of Butt.
posted by Evstar at 5:08 PM on January 3, 2005

I have loved Metacritic since its launch. It is a small enterprise with a founding mission "to both provide access to and summarize the vast amount of entertainment criticism available online".... Metacritic.com ... officially launched in January, 2001 thanks to the hard work of its three founding members, all former attorneys who were happy to find a more constructive (but less profitable) use of their time."

The three are: Jason Dietz (Music Editor/Books Editor); Marc Doyle (Games Editor); Julie Roberts (Film Editor).

I consider the site a "one-stop" place to get quick and comprehensive reviews of things I am considering watching, listening to...and now reading. A handy digest of collected critique.

I use the film rankings to help point me in the direction of considering what DVDs to add to my NetFlix queque.
posted by ericb at 7:27 PM on January 3, 2005

I've had a few of my music reviews aggregated on metacritic, and since there's no quantitative rating on my reviews, it's been interesting watching how metacritic interprets what I wrote- they give out 70 when I coulda sworn I described a firm 85. I try not to gush, but I must be crankier than I thought.
posted by bendybendy at 8:09 PM on January 3, 2005

I have loved Metacritic since its launch.

Indeed. It rocks.

This similar site is also good (for movies).
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:18 PM on January 3, 2005

On a side note just because i didnt want to make an fpp that would get me slammed for shamelessly promoting a novel. If you like cyber punk stuff you should try Idlewild by nick sagan. It held me more captivated than i've been since the matrix previews started comming out and i was wondering what the fuck the whole thing was about. Only idlewild also involved brilliantly developed charachters and the feeling of madness. Also nick sagan throws you some curve balls that don't mesh with the everything is going to be ok mentality that so many authors etc.. try to throw at you.


I apologize if the matrix assosciation pissed you off but its rarely that i see a movie not knowing exactly what was going to happen, and i think its the sign of a good piece of literature that lets you guess and guess and constantly be wrong.
posted by sourbrew at 9:40 PM on January 3, 2005

stavrosthewonderchicken - thanks for the intro to cin-o-matic!
posted by ericb at 8:05 PM on January 4, 2005