Missing the point

I love the feature in Amazon that lets you look at reviews for a book specifically by how many stars people have given it.

For example I read Me Cheeta, the fake autobiography of the chimp in the Tarzan films, by James Lever, on a recent flight, and was laughing like a drain for a lot of it.

It's really just a very bitchy, funny, showbiz memoir, which probably makes a lot of stories up, and steals others from books like The Moon's a Balloon. It's great fun, especially if you like films from the 30s and 40s.

Some reviewers on Amazon have rather hilariously missed the point though, like this one:

"My book group read this book as we had been impressed by the reviews, but we all, without exception, thought it was awful: badly written, tedious, with no redeeming features other than the photographs. We tried, and failed, to find it amusing. We tried, and failed, to understand what the reviewers saw in it, and it's a mystery to me how it has made it onto the "long list" for the Booker prize!"

Or perhaps it's me that missed the point. Anyway, the story about David Niven, Johnny Weissmuller, two dwarfs, a lion, a Rolls Royce, and Cheeta is worth the price of the book alone - and that's only about 2 pages of it.