This week somebody asked me why the books I review on the blog were pretty much all three star reviews or above. This lady asked me if I was afraid of hurting the author’s feelings!

I’m very lucky to be in a position where I get 95% of the books that I read from the publishers as advance reading copies (ARCs). And I get an awful lot of them. When I was spending three hours a day on a commuter train it was perfect – I was getting through three books a week which had previously made for a pretty expensive commute!

Now that my reading time has been reduced I find that I’m a lot more selective about the books that I choose to spend my precious reading time with. I do tend to go for authors that I’ve previously enjoyed or genres that interest me. If I don’t have much time to spend with my books then those ARCs get chosen wisely.

In fact there are quite a few other books that I’ve picked up and started reading only to realise that I can’t possibly persevere with them. Sometimes wading through treacle just isn’t worth the effort. So I don’t inflict those upon you.

So, it’s not that I’m a sycophantic reader by any means I’m just a bit picky and I hope that if I’ve enjoyed a book enough to pick it up and write about it that it might inspire someone else to give it a go.

(BTW choosing an author that you’ve loved previously isn’t always a guide to greatness Jo Nesbo’s “Macbeth” being a perfect example…)

Categories: Opinion

Tagged as: Reviews; Opinions;

angelnet69

Prolific reader, enthusiastic theatre and movie-goer and ex-Olivier Awards judge who spent twenty years working in the music industry in London. Sharing my house with a gorgeous cockapoo called Harry who has taken over completely.
I love sharing my favourite books with friends - nearly always spoiler-free as I hate reading a synopsis of the whole book in other reviews.

#BookAdvocatesUnite