I saw someone post in here the other day about how they didn’t enjoy a relatively new, very popular book. I’ve seen *a lot* of people say this about this novel, very suddenly—after weeks of positive reviews about it. Since then, I’ve been thinking about how readers should navigate reviews when picking a book in this new era of reading.
In the past, people mostly just said or wrote exactly what they felt and you made your decision based off of thoughts around the author’s skill and the themes explored in the book. Now, it’s loads of paid and/or heavily embellished reviews that mislead the reader, which leads to more people reading a book that they would’ve never read otherwise and having a negative experience. I think that makes reviews more unreliable now than they’ve ever been. (It also lessens the quality of the books receiving accolades overtime, but I digress.)
That’s not to say that there aren’t good book reviewers, but that market is very saturated and very few of them do at least a little literary analysis on these titles before highly recommending them as a “life changing” read. (Goodreads is the exact opposite, everyone is a critic and it leaves you even more confused on if a book is even worth looking at, lol.)
So, what’s your process when deciding on what book to read? How do you navigate reviews? What draws you to or turns you away from a book? Are you successful at avoiding bad reads?
by poopmaester41
1 Comment
I don’t read a lot of reviews to begin with. When I do, chances are I’ve specifically looked for a reviewer I like (e.g. Michiko Kakutani, formerly of the NYT), or I’m coming in with a specific question in mind. I don’t just browse reviews.
What I do browse are awards I care about, both the longlist and shortlist. I also look at the judges on the panel and google around to see if they had anything extra to say about the books on the list (or other things they’ve read that year).
I care about what writer’s I respect think. When I see an author I like praise something, it goes to the top of the “check this out later” pile.
Randomly reading goodreads reviews is not helpful. Neither are goodreads ratings a good indication of anything really. And honestly, I’ve been pretty successfully avoiding bad reads without ever resorting to random goodreads reviews. The couple of times I had a disappointing read, it was because I disregarded my usual sources and read something that just seemed very popular on goodreads or tiktok.