Who Cares About Literary Prizes?

I wouldn't unless they were administered an IQ test first. Pretty sure I wouldn't like the Davinci code or Harry freaking Potter (the fundamentalists were right about this stealing the souls of those who read it). For example, from the OP link:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7.Best_Books_of_the_21st...

Almost 100% hot garbage.

I used to subscribe to the New Criterion to read book reviews of ... actually intelligent books that were picked for something resembling literary merit. Even that kind of faded away; now finding good books is basically Samizdat.

How useful you find the ratings on sites like that really depends on how close your taste is to that of its reviewers on average.

In my own case the IMDB Top 250 list is about 50/50 hit or miss. I strongly disagree with many of the high ratings for "classic" and "great" movies on that site and many others. But apparently many other viewers love that stuff and hate many of the movies I love. So my taste is pretty different from theirs.

Even when I find people with tastes close to mine there are still movies we strongly disagree on. There used to be a website called YMDB which let you enter in your top 20 favorite movies and would match you with people who had similar lists. That was a very useful site for finding new movies to watch, but even when I'd find people with lots of my favorite movies on their lists, they'd still tend to have some movies which I absolutely hated on there too.

So it's very hard to find people who's tastes are absolutely identical and whose judgment in films, books, or whatever you can absolutely rely on. But if their tastes are close to yours then the likelihood of them recommending something you'd like increases compared to some random review site like IMDB, Amazon, Goodreads, Rotton Tomatoes, or whatever.

This is why I really pay absoultely no attention to the Oscars, Pulitzer Prizes, and other awards. They're popularity contests among people whose tastes I don't share or trust. The winners might as well be random.

I much more value of the opinion of a trusted friend whose tastes I share.

Something else that's useful is subreddits on small, obscure genres of literature I like and blogs on obscure authors I like. The more obscure the better, as the usefulness of such sites tend to decrease the more popular the subject matter is and the more people contribute to them. Then the law of averages kicks in and the odds of getting poor recommendations increases.

I used to find Amazon was good, the people who bought this also bought..., now though there are too many people not like me there I guess. It used to be book people as a guess, now it seems pretty random.

I have found a new method - going to a bookshop :-). There's a specialist book shop near me that really is into the same books as me, it works a treat. The unfortunate part is I have to buy paper books again, but oh well, thats still nice, particularly since the prices on kindle don't seem to be very different any more either.

Low readership entails high variance.

Atlas shrugged is awful, from a literary-critical point of view. The prose is thin at best. The narrative is hamfistedly didactic, at best. It's barely even a novel in the sense intended by novelists (or readers of novels, broadly). It's a weird example. Judged only by its artistic merits it would be down there with cheap genre fiction or bad soap romance as essentially political porn. Probably not a great litmus test.

Then why post here?