Book Review Habits: A Consideration

 

I didn’t even bother to really write yesterday. I did write a review for one of the books I read, Aquaman: The Trench. I’m not sure why I felt the need or inclination or whatever to write a review for it, but the mood struck me and so I did. I wonder if there’s a pattern to my review writing. Obviously, anything I get from NetGalley that I read, I review, but I wonder if, for every so many books I finish, the urge strikes me and I write a review. I’ve never noticed a pattern, but that doesn’t mean there is one. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that there’s a way to track such a thing. I could look into how many books I’ve reviewed as compared to how many books I’ve read I suppose, which wouldn’t be an easy feat but might be possible. Still, I’m not sure how well that would factor in the books I’m re-reading especially if I have already written a review for the title. Alternatively, I suppose I could start keeping track of how many books I’ve read between each review I feel like writing, but I feel like watching myself for a pattern would skew the results of the “study.”  There’s a reason that they try to make psychological and medical studies unbiased and double-blind with a control group.

 

Maybe that’s making the question a bit more serious than it really needs to be, but at the same time, what’s the point of doing an “experiment” if you’re not going to be reasonably sure of the results? I suppose going through the last few months of books read versus books review would give some kind of decent ratio and possibly show a pattern, but I think that would end up being an extraordinary amount of work. Unless I can show whether or not the book has been reviewed on Goodreads when I sort them by date read. I should probably look into that.

Book Review Habits: A Follow Up Consideration

Well, as it turns out there is an option to show your review when looking at your “read” list in GoodReads so that you can see what you said about the books as you scroll through. The problem is things like re-reads and reviews that are only me going “eeeeeee I love this so muchhhhhhhhh” that I don’t want to include kind of mess up how I’m supposed to count. Sometimes I wrote the review on the first read and the review shouldn’t be counted where it is in the line up because the line up order is when I last read it. So a review I wrote for, say, one of Shelly Laurenston’s books when I first read them four odd years ago (at a guess off the top of my head), show up where I just re-read them a couple of months ago.

 

Granted, there probably isn’t any real, solid pattern. It probably has more to do with how I feel about the book, the author, and where it came from. Again, if it’s an ARC from NetGalley, it’s definitely going to get a review. If I loved, loved, loved it I’ll probably write a few sentences extolling whatever made me fall in love with it. If I wasn’t thrilled with it, I’ll likely write about why I’m not giving it a great review. I feel like if I’m going to give someone less than three stars, I ought to give my reasons. Sometimes they’re personal reason. Sometimes I just like to complain. Then, if something was really popular and I didn’t think it was good, I think I often like to write about why I didn’t care for it. If something is mostly hated and I don’t understand why it’s so hated, I like to write about that too. I know sometimes I like to write about why I like something that is considered “bad,” especially if it’s something strongly in the spotlight e.g. Twilight. I try to keep myself from feeling like I should have to defend why I like things, but sometimes it feels good to write out why you enjoy something trashy. I think it’s a little like talking about why I love macorni and cheese and hot dogs for dinner (beside each other, not mixed together… though I don’t know if I’d be opposed to eating mac and cheese on a hot dog).

 

I think you get my point.

 

I’m still sort of curious about it. If there are times when it’s just that I’ve read so many books without writing a reivew that I feel like I have to review the one I’ve just finished. It would be very interesting to know.

 

But enough of that for now. I need to go to bed!