“Has this ever happened to you? A book has the critics in full-throttle gush and then wins a big prize and/or becomes a bestseller. So you read it, or start it, anyway. You don’t like it, but you know you must be wrong. That makes you hate it even more because it’s making you feel like a clod.” So, asks Cynthia Crossen in this Wall Street Journal column, what do you do? You vent on Amazon, that’s what. She found lots of people there who, like her, don’t like a lot of new books that other people rave about. “This was the first book I’ve ever thrown in the garbage,” she finds one reader reviewer saying about Anne Enright‘s “The Gathering.” It isn’t just hip new books, either — the classics are also the subject of unhappy comment: “Moby Ick is more like it,” says one.

Of course, careful with whom you compare yourself — for example, there’s the reassurance Crossen takes from the reviewer of John Banville‘s The Sea, who says, “It is the only book I have never finished, and I read probably a book a weak.” Then there’s the comment about Booker winner The Gathering: “At the book club we even joked about having a ritual burning of it as we disliked it so much.” Says Crossen, “Those words were a comfort to me.”

Hmm. So, one can only suppose she felt at least a tad of comfort at the comment on the page for her own book at Amazon that it was an “INCREDIBLY laborious read.”