It’s been a long time since I wrote any discussion posts, but I’ve been mulling over this topic lately. Especially with non-fiction, but sometimes with fiction as well, people get quite annoyed with the way I rate books. Back when I was on Goodreads, there was one guy who would often comment and note that he expected “better” of me (because of my English lit degree) when I didn’t like the classics or rated a book low just because I didn’t like the characters.

So first off, to set the scene, how do I rate? I rate the same for both fiction and non-fiction: did I like it? Did I enjoy it? I do not try to give anything some kind of “objective” rating, because I believe that’s very difficult — and also not useful to the majority of people who read my reviews. Most people who read my reviews don’t want to know if I thought Payment Deferred (C.S. Forester) was technically interesting, but whether it was enjoyable as a piece of classic crime fiction. Is it worth reading?

(The answer is “maybe”. If you’re particularly interested in inverted mysteries, it might be one for you. If you’d hate spending a whole book following around a murderer and watching how that splits his family apart, with everyone behaving horribly, then skip it.)

Instead, I give ratings that are consistent and over time can give you a picture of what I like and dislike, and you can then take me with a pinch of salt. There are a few reviewers I know whose ratings I don’t exactly agree with, but I know what they mean.

I got my rating system from Goodreads waaaay back when I was a teenager (I suspect we’re at over 20 years of me rating and reviewing books now, yikes):

• One star: disliked it
• Two stars: it was okay
• Three stars: liked it
• Four stars: really liked it
• Five stars: it was amazing

I know some people always disliked that scale, and ignored that way of rating books. I know authors tie themselves in absolute knots over getting a one-star review, as if it means anything other than “this reader didn’t like my book”. But I always liked the fact that it had plenty of room for nuance on books you get along with, and didn’t waste a lot of time with gradations of dislike, and that it’s focused on whether you enjoyed reading the book.

Is it fair to rate non-fiction books based on whether I liked them? Yeah. I’m reviewing for fun here. There are several non-fiction books I’ve liked which are scanty with their sources, but stylistically enjoyable. You take ’em with a pinch of salt and move on, enjoying the language or the flight of rhetoric as you go.

There’s one guy who is completely wetting himself over on Goodreads about a really old review of mine, about a non-fiction book, complaining that I wasn’t rating the book but my reaction to it. And: yep. Unashamedly, forever, yep. But I did also write extensively about why — the weird judgements of sexualities other than heterosexuality, the references to discredited research, etc. As I noted in the review, the research hadn’t yet been discredited at the time the book was written, but the signs were there: obvious biases in recruitment into studies, conflicts of interest, poor statistical literacy.

You can take my opinions on these things for what they’re worth. Reading on my blog, you know more or less who I am — queer; British (Welsh); in my thirties; studied English lit, biology and infectious diseases; lover of libraries — and a thinking reader can quickly ascertain what I’m about and where I stand, and thus what I bring to reading and reviewing. Can figure out, for instance, that I probably do have the chops to evaluate whether someone ought to have known a particular line of research was utter bullshit ahead of time. To study biology or infectious diseases, statistics is a necessity. I’m not good at math per se, but I got a first and a distinction respectively in my BSc and MSc courses on statistics. Put two and two together (as even I can do) and you’ll know whether I’m spouting bullshit or not.

As for objectivity… it requires a great deal of self-knowledge to get anywhere close to objectivity. Sometimes, I do step back and think, “Y’know, objectively, the writing is very beautiful.” And I’ll say so in my review, if that’s what I think.

But that’s not what you need to know, is it?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is for posts that give you the best glimpse of me. Let’s give it a shot…

1. Guilty Pleasures. To quote this post, “fuck that noise”. I don’t believe in ’em. I went all the way back to 2015 looking at my discussion posts, found this one, and agree with every word of it still. No such thing as a guilty pleasure.
2. Spoilers! Also an old post, and still true: I like spoilers. I have read all sorts of stuff about the later sections of Heaven Official’s Blessing, and it really adds to the experience for me.
3. Why reread? This is a topic that’s come up over and over again: I like to reread books I enjoy, and re-experience them. There’s another more recent post, and it’s not even the only one…
4. On giving up, but positively and Discussion: Putting the Joy Back Into It. Both of these are about reading/blogging habits I wanted to stop in order to stop feeling a sense of obligation around blogging. I can’t say I’ve always stuck to these resolutions, but it is something that’s important to me in reading and blogging: I’m not doing it as a job, I’m doing it for fun.
5. Discussion: Real Life. How much should you talk about your real life on your blog? I guess that depends on you, but I’m fairly open about mine (while keeping it mostly about the books).
6. Why haven’t you read ___ yet? And here you will learn that I’m contrary, and if everyone wants me to read something, I… probably won’t.
7. Review: Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer, by Susan Scott & Christopher J. Duncan. The book is arrant nonsense. My reaction to it is probably pretty telling about the kind of person I am.
8. Top Ten Tuesday: Reading Memories. This is a recent one — but what better way to know me than through my most salient memories of reading?
9. Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Read The Most By. You can know me by the books I love…
10. Top Ten Tuesday: Things I’d Have At My Bookish Party. My idea of a “party” is pretty telling, I think.

That was harder than I thought, because these days I mostly post reviews, Top Ten Tuesday, WWW Wednesday and Stacking the Shelves/Sunday Post. But I think you can still get a solid idea of who I am and who I’ve been!

Welcome to the Weekly Blogging Challenge blog hop, hosted by Long and Short Reviews. This week’s topic is “rereading books: why or why not?”.

The answer for me is that I do, of course — as I think most people around here have noticed, ahaha, since I always write a new review. I’m on my umpteenth review to write of Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. I have a whole list of reasons, so… let’s make it a list.

1. For fun. Reading should be fun. I find that I get easily focused away from that fact, and see it happening for other bloggers too. So if rereading a book sounds fun to you — if you’re like, gah, “I can’t remember the ending of XYZ and I really want to reread it” — my answer is pretty much always going to be “go for it!”
2. For comfort. Familiar literature can be a really different experience to a brand new book. You know what’s coming, so you’re not bracing yourself for the next awful thing that’s going to happen to beloved characters… at least not in the same way! You know what to expect, which makes it a much less daunting prospect when you have had an awful day.
3. Because it’s better the second time. Maybe that’s because it’s a really complex world and you were totally lost the first time; maybe it’s because the writing is really clever and when you read it the second time, you get to appreciate all the clues; maybe you notice different things, because you’re a different person between now and then.
4. To prepare for the next book in the series. I’m constantly having to go back to earlier books to remind myself what the heck’s going on.
5. To share the experience with someone else. I’ve had some great buddy reads where I’ve read the book before, but I also get to see someone experience it for the first time. Lots of fun.
6. Because it sticks in your head. I’m glad I reread Mira Grant’s Feed, and Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, because… I didn’t like them that much the first time. But something in them stuck with me, and honestly, they’ve probably all gained two extra stars out of five — or even three — since I first read them. Some alchemy kept happening in my brain after I read them, and when I came back to them because they niggled at me, they opened right up and really worked for me.

I can honestly probably keep going and come up with more reasons. I know some people feel that there are so many books in the world, they can’t possibly justify rereading a book they’ve already read. But it’s not possible to read all the books in the world, even if you never reread even a single page, so if you can find enjoyment in rereading a book… why not?

(I know there are some people who can’t, who hate the predictability, and that’s cool too.)

Because I read a lot (once upon a time I managed 500 books in a year; now it’s more like 200), I frequently get asked what the trick is. People seem to think I have a lifehack or something that I can share with other people. I’ll break that down a bit more below, but here’s what I think (looking back) is the biggest driver for me meeting my reading goals…

I do best when I don’t care about the goals at all.

My reading has slowed down more and more with every goal I add, every challenge I decide I have to meet. It’s also slowed down because I’m an adult working 30 hours a week and studying and trying to be a healthy person with a tidy house — there’s no denying that. And the increased amount of non-fiction I read now is a factor as well. But there’s a fairly large correlation between when I started really worrying about meeting reading goals and when my reading speed abruptly dropped.

Now, I do have some habits which I think help me read a lot, so I’ll summarise them below:

1. Always have a book with you. You never know when you’re going to have a tedious hour stuck by the side of the road waiting for a bus or a towtruck. Or a 30-minute wait at an appointment. Even a five-minute wait for the train gives me time to fit in a chapter.
2. Pick up the book, not your phone (unless the book is on your phone). It goes without saying, really.
3. Give yourself at least a little room to read based on whims. Reading isn’t meant to be a chore. You don’t need a pre-planned TBR. If you’re really excited to read a book, you’ll remember it. You won’t be able to keep your hands off it.
4. Buy books you’re excited about. If it’s just a case of “I feel like I should read this”, that book is destined to moulder on the TBR pile forever. And my TBR pile is daunting as heck now because of exactly the wrong kinds of purchasing decisions.
5. Make the time. It’s been a shit day, but you can still turn some pages. And if you like reading and you’re reading a book you’re excited about, that’s only gonna make your day better.

That’s it. That’s my magic bullet. Everything else comes and goes, but these things are constant and always help toward meeting my goals.

Welp, here we are at the end of the year, and I don’t think I’ll be finishing another book before midnight. How’s it been? Well. I’ve read less than I have in a long time. I think I’ve enjoyed my reading more than maybe last year, when I was starting to feel painted into a corner with silly rules. I don’t know if I’ve fixed that, exactly, but I’m hoping I have.

Here are some neat figures from my organisational spreadsheet:

OTHER STATS:

Total read: 213
Number of rereads: 51 (24%)
Total page count: 62,991 (-10,090 from last year)
Most-read genre per month:

• January: History
• February: Science
• March: Science & History (tied)
• April: Fantasy
• May: Fantasy
• June: Fantasy
• July: Fantasy
• August: Fantasy
• September: Fantasy
• October: Mystery
• November: Mystery
• December: Romance

Number of ratings:

• Five stars: 17
• Four stars: 97
• Three stars: 66
• Two stars: 27
• One star: 6

First book read: The Bell at Sealey Head (Patricia A. McKillip)
Last book read: The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal (K.J. Charles)
First book bought: A Murder Most Unladylike (Robin Stevens)
Last book bought: Sorting the Beef from the Bull (Nicola Temple & Richard Evershed)

Well folks, the time has come to talk of many things. Just up front: I’m not quitting blogging! Things just need to change, that’s all.

But let’s begin at the beginning, with the background: for the last year or two, or… no, let’s be honest, at least three or four years now, reading has started to feel like a bit of a chore. Not all the time, but more and more. When I do read, I enjoy it, but it’s become something I almost have to schedule time for. I’ve tried a couple of different things to make that better (Game of Books is one of them), but I think overall it’s become a bit too much of a boxticking activity. Every so often I get the urge to kick over the traces and ditch all my rules, and each time it’s resulted in a new set of rules and no net gain.

(Particularly because the average number of books I read in a year has fallen, despite all the lists, all the desperation to keep up with things!)

Balls to that, right? So, when was I happy with my reading last? I think in retrospect I’d put that at about the time I started leaving Goodreads, before I kept track of things with spreadsheets and before I started trying to keep some kind of regular blog schedule. (Actually, I pinned this solely to the spreadsheets, but the wife-creature kept poking me to think about what else might be in play.)

So, come the end of this year, I’m going to stop tracking my reading so obsessively. I don’t want to know how many books I’ve read this year. At the moment, my admirable wife is going to take over the tracking (and refuse to let me see it) so that at the end of the year, I can get a bunch of pretty graphs and pie charts to talk about my reading year with. That’s the plan for 2020, and if it doesn’t work out, well, maybe I won’t track my reading at all. I suspect I just need to get the numbers out of it, though; I was very happy when I was using Goodreads for it.

(I’d start now, but I need the spreadsheet to help me with my book blanket project, and I’m far too fond of that to let it go!)

I might also stop trying to track my progress vs my backlog. It’s never-ending, and it’s become about striking books off a list rather than enjoying them. We’ll see; it’s as the whim takes me.

More immediately, and more relevantly for you guys, I’m also going to stop scheduling my posts in advance. One of the things that was part of my routine on Goodreads was going to write a review as soon as I’d finished a book, and publishing it right away. That way I could share my feelings about the books I was reading more or less in real-time.

So, posts will no longer go live at 9:00am BST on the dot; reviews will be posted when I’ve finished a book, and that means there might be two posts on some days and then none for a week. When I get into obsessive mode and read five books in a row about influenza, there could be five reviews all in a row on books about influenza. So be it! I trust you’re all here for my reviews, in all their weird and wonderful variety, and not for a rigid posting schedule.

(For a few days or weeks I do have a backlog of reviews that haven’t been posted yet; I’ll publish those when there’s a day or two without other reviews, but once they’re gone, they’re gone. I do actually have a review for a book I finished today, but I’ll hold it just until morning so there aren’t too many posts on my blog, and more to the point in people’s notifications, in one day.)

I think I will still post a Weekly Roundup and What Are You Reading Wednesday, but I shan’t be obsessive about it either. Blogging isn’t my job — in fact, it has signally failed to produce any income at all on the occasions I’ve tried affiliate links and a donation button — and nor do I want it to be.

I’m trying to have no expectations about how this little project will go — maybe I will read less, not more! But hopefully I will be happier, and I’m sure you all want that for me!