"There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
A few days after my blog post giving the gold star system of rating everything from books to bikes my rating of no stars, I received an email from Amazon asking me how many stars would I give The Great Gatsby? I fell silent as I imagined negative Amazon reviews for masterpieces: a 1-star review for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez ("Not very realistic"); 1-star for Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust ("Too much writing"); a 2-star review for The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway ("Not enough adjectives"); 2-stars for Ulysses by James Joyce ("Too Irish"); and, 1 for Mrs. Dalloway, ("Too thoughtful"). I could give lots more examples but don't have time to right now as I'm on my way to reviewing the complete works of William Shakespeare.
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