Terrible review for terrible book—that doesn’t even exist yet

Bam pointed me to this delicious bit of absurdity today: Swedish dude writes a scathing review for a book that was never written.

As far as stupid and utterly pointless asshole moves, this ranks as one of the stupidest and most pointless I’ve read in a while. The paragraph below is possibly my favorite:

The newspaper has made an “unreserved apology” to Mattsson. Lundberg’s apology was more qualified. He told Svensk Bokhandel magazine that he had “got worked up in advance about Britt-Marie Mattsson because I detest her so very greatly. But let’s hope the book is published so I get the chance to say it for real.”

Hee! Dude sticks to his guns, you gotta give him that. “Fine, you caught me this time. But I have every faith that you will still SUCK THE ALMIGHTY WANG and I will stick it to you good when the book finally comes out.”

I wonder how the editors let this slip by them, though? I would’ve thought that they’d check the book’s title and ISBN to ensure at least a smidgen of accuracy.

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News

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  1. OK, the news story was funny, but the Swedish newspaper was hysterical!  Did you see the Ikea ads?

    Dang, now I’m missing Minnesota.  Which in the middle of January is very strange indeed.

  2. Flo says:

    That was all kinds of awesome… especially since they had to get that dig in about reviewers just skimming books and they *loftily* knew all along!

  3. bam says:

    Naw, dude, my favorite part was in the end when it said something like, “We’ve always suspected reviewers skim these books. Now we know they do! Sneaky bastards!”

  4. Stella says:

    Oh dear, I didn’t expect to see this story discussed at SBTN when I read it in DN! It’s all quite funny, especielly the guy’s utter refusal to apologize. The newspaper sacked him of course. The story goes something like he got a huge box of about 100 thriller/crime/detective novels to mass review and didn’t have time to read them all. The fact that he actually reviewed a nonexistent one makes me wonder how often he has reviewed existent one without actually reading them first… I mean, who can tell the difference from a sentence or two in a mass review?

  5. AngieZ says:

    Well even though he didn’t like the book, I bet Harriet Klausner gave it 5 stars.

  6. Ann Aguirre says:

    Well played, AngieZ. Well played.

  7. Amy E says:

    Laughing my ass off!  You know, I think I’m going to take a life lesson away from this—all the good reviews, the reviewer clearly read my books.  The bad ones?  They obviously didn’t even crack the cover.

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