The matter of that woman who lost her book contract for anomymously attacking other authors' books got me to wondering what kind of book reviewer I am. So I went back through my "books" tab and discovered that over the 15 years of this blog I have reviewed about 200 books. ("About" because it's hard to count something like my A Year of Haruki Murakami, and because sometimes I mention a book but then go on to write entirely about one point of interest to me.) I assigned a numerical value to each review, one star to five; everything I said I "loved" got five stars.
It turns out that I am a pretty generous reviewer. I think only one of my reviews was a one star (of Red Leopard, Black Wolf), and only about three were two stars. The average for 102 non-fiction works was 4.2 stars; for 98 works of fiction, 3.8. If I separate out 24 works that are sci-fi or fantasy, they would rate about 3.7.
It is not that I love all books so much; in fact I think most of them are trash. It's just that I long ago lost any compunction to finish books just because I started them, so if I'm not enjoying a book, I cast it aside and move on without giving it another thought. If a book made little impression on me, I would generally not bore my readers about it. The exception is fantasy, a subject on which I consider myself an expert, so I sometimes read books because I feel like I ought to and pass on my opinions as perhaps being of more interest than my opinions in other genres.
I also sometimes read books for work, but those rarely make it here, and of course I read those differently, skipping over large sections to get to the relevant parts.
So anyway I think I am safe from the accusation that I have been trashing other authors to somehow upvote myself.
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