24 Festive Tasks: Door 9 – World Philosphy Day, Tasks 1 and 2:
Share your reading philosophy with us – do you DNF? If so, do you have a page minimum to read before you declare it a DNF?
And:
Share your reviewing philosophy with us – how do you rate a book? Do you have a mental template for reviewing? Rules you try to follow, or rules you try to break?
My reading philosophy: As long as there is at least something in the book that maintains a minimum of my interest, I’ll finish it. If I get bored or, worse, seriously annoyed, I’ll DNF; regardless how far into the book I’ve gotten up to then. This (almost) past year, I finished a few books that I would otherwise have DNF’d because I was reading them for BookLikes games — that may very well change next year. Life’s just too short and there are too many other books out there that I’m interested in.
My rating philosophy is set out HERE — tl;dr version: It’s a gut feeling; definitely not a mental template (least of all, an unbreakable one). Every so often I’ll revise my rating as a result of a reread, or if I decide that compared to similar books or in the grand scheme of all books by that particular author that I’ve read, my spontaneous rating perhaps wasn’t entirely fair, but if I do this at all (and it’s only in rare cases to begin with), it will likely only be a half-star adjustment; almost never a full star, and under no circumstances anything even more drastic.
As for reviews, I only ever write them if I feel strongly motivated enough to do so in the first place. I don’t ever want reviews to become anything even remotely resembling a chore; which is also why I don’t do Netgalley and why I don’t accept free books for review purposes. I also don’t ever want even the slightest sense of feeling beholden to someone to get in the way of my reviewing. — If I do review, again I don’t have any template; mental or otherwise. Drafting each review individually, based on the book in question and my personal reading experience (and the associations the book may have raised in my mind) is a huge part of what makes reviewing fun to me.
Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1998609/24-festive-tasks-door-9-world-philosphy-day-tasks-1-and-2
