Salman Rushdie’s Ratings of Other Authors Goes Viral

From the “It happened on the Internet so it must matter a lot” department, Salman Rushdie’s social media gaff in rating fellow authors has gone viral. The author of The Satanic Verses is getting a lot of criticism right now for rating books on Goodreads. From The Independent:

The outspoken writer gave Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis only one star, and Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mocking Bird – thought by many to be one of the greatest novels of all time – just three stars.

When fellow readers challenged his judgement, Rushdie declined to justify his ratings and blamed ignorance of social media for his indiscretion. “I’m so clumsy in this new world of social media sometimes. I thought these rankings were a private thing designed to tell the site what sort of book to recommend to me, or not recommend. Turns out they are public. Stupid me. Well, I don’t like the work of Kingsley Amis, there it is. I don’t have to explain or justify. It’s allowed,” he wrote.

The full piece is here. January Magazine’s 2002 interview with Rushdie is here.