Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Awful, Pretentious Book

This was a completely worthless reading experience for me. It seemed like there was the potential for a good story here, but Michael Rips never really got around to it. He was too in love with his own "quirkiness" and telling bizarre little side tales without explanation.The non sequiturs in this book were numerous enough to fill up a book of their own. A few random moments and diversions can be entertaining but, for the most part, this was nothing but random moments with brief glimpses of a plot. Over and over again a new character would be introduced for one anecdote--invariably being a disturbing, violent, or sexual one--and then never mentioned again. That would be it. Nothing to do with the larger narrative, no thematic point to it, nothing.There was the potential of a good book here, but it simply got lost beneath the author's own extravagances and pretension.