Really? Wall Street Journal Blog...

I was perusing the San Francisco Public Library website this morning, finding books I'd like to read and reserving copies of them. I wasn't so sure about one in particular, Fred Thompson's memoir-- Teaching the Pig to Dance (you may remember Fred from his role as District Attorney Arthur Branch in Law & Order), so I decided to look online and read some reviews. I had seen Mr. Thompson talk about his book on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and it sounded good from what I heard, but I also wanted an objective point of view before embarking on reading it.

I'm very picky with books and if you haven't grasped my attention in the first twenty pages, then I'm putting you down. There was one time when I put a book down for good, even though there were only forty-some pages left in the novel. It was Norweigan Wood by Murakami and by the time I was nearly finished, I had decided that I didn't care at all about the characters and I was getting to the point where I was hoping bad things would happen to them in the story. What a snooze, and what a waste of my time. If only I had read some reviews before ever picking up that boring POS.

So, I did a Google search of the title and found a link to a Wall Street Journal blog review of the book. The WSJ is, of course, a reputable news source and I didn't think the blog would be any different. Wrong. Full of errors, both grammatical and content-wise. I was surprised when I saw such an obvious error written into the review and decided to leave a comment:

"This is the Wall Street Journal blog? I know times are tough, but you should consider hiring an editor: ‘There are bland tales of “schoolboy crimes” including flinging a water bottle into a window fan to spray the patrons of a cafe in Lawenceburg cafe and…’ Geez, even my personal blog doesn’t have blunders like that."

The rest of the comments section is made up of people who actually read the book and are correcting the reviewer on some really stupid mistakes he made in his review, like incorrectly naming Thompson's hometown, misinterpreting some of the stories told in the memoir, it's as if the reviewer didn't read the book at all.

If you want to see for yourself how bad the review is, and read some of the funny comments readers left, click here. And seriously, people at the WSJ, if you want your official blog to look legitimate you should hire a pro. If you'd like, I can easily send you my resume. Just let me know.