THE DNF. (For the newbies out there, a DNF is when you mark a book as “did not finish.” You stop reading the book, set it aside, and may or may not ever return to it.) I think I’ve mentioned in the past how difficult it is for me to DNF books, even when I’m not really enjoying them. I know there are LOTS of bloggers who are able to stop reading books whenever they can. I don’t know why; I just can’t bring myself to do it most of the time. I was talking with Lisa on Twitter recently and she brought up some great points. I decided to poll some fellow bloggers on the number one reason they decide to DNF a book and use them as inspiration for this post.   Why do I rarely DNF? When I talked with Lisa about this, the main reason I came up with was the fact that I first have plenty of time to read. Honestly, my boyfriend and I are not busy people by any means. We prefer to hang out at home. He’ll build Legos or play video games while I read. On top of that, I have some time in the morning to read before work. When Chris gets up and leaves for work at six, I usually can’t fall back asleep. This gives me almost two hours of reading time before I have to start getting ready for work. I also always have an audiobook going, so I […]

BOOK RATINGS (PART 2). I’ve talked once before on book ratings, when I talked about how I rate books, what it means to have a “valuable opinion” (according to some butthead on Twitter), and my generally high rating average on Goodreads. Now that I’ve gotten further into reading and reviewing books, I’ve been thinking about more topics on book ratings. There’s SO much that goes into rating a book once you finish. I’ve found myself coming up with these rating-related issues lately. Brittany posted a discussion about changing book ratings that helped me in thinking about this post. Sometimes you have no issue rating a book. You loved it. End of story! It gets between 4 and 5 stars. The harder ones to review are the MEH books. The ones that didn’t bother you too much either way. Do you penalize them because they didn’t wow you? Or do you say that because nothing outright offended you, you can stick to maybe 3 stars? It’s also fairly easy to rate books you hated. Obviously they’re not getting much more than something around 2 stars or less. Lately my ratings have changed SO MUCH. I posted on Twitter a while back that I changed my rating for Red Queen about five times after finishing it. I’ve come to find that there are four main instances where my rating may change between the time I finish the post, as I’m writing the review, and before the review is actually posted. (Part of the issue could be that […]

BOOK RATINGS. I saw a Twitter conversation a month or so ago about the ratings that bloggers and readers give to books. These ratings could be on Goodreads or on blogs. This person thought that if someone’s Goodreads ratings average was too high, they weren’t critical enough – and therefore their opinion was not valued in the community. They should not bother with book blogging or reviewing, because they were not actual critics of books. I didn’t even know how to formulate a logical tweet in response, so I let it be. And by let it be, I mean let it stew for months until I was able to come up with this post. But Taylor pretty much sums up my reaction: I think that’s bullshit. I should go without saying that all opinions can be valued as long as they are not particularly offensive, racist, sexist, etc. Who gets to determine if someone’s opinion is valuable or not?? Not some random guy on Twitter, that’s for sure. Let me back up a little bit and talk about ratings in general and my thoughts on them. How I rate books on my blog I use my little heart system here on the left to rate books. I DO use half-hearts (quite a bit, actually), as the bottom of the graphic shows. I don’t think it’s possible, for me at least, to give EVERY book I read a dead-set rating between 1 and 5 without any halves. The 5 heart rating is given to books that […]