24 Festive Tasks: Door 12 – World Philosophy Day, Task 1 & Bonus Task:
Task 1: What is your reviewing / rating policy? Do you accept book review requests?
Bonus Task: Half star ratings or not? Tell us what you think and whether you use them.
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.
And as the above implies, hell, yes, I absolutely do use half-star ratings. There used to be a time when I thought I didn’t need them, but I have very much come to change my mind on that. Recently, I’ve even been contemplating the use of quarter stars … but eventually concluded that that would make the whole thing just too complex and even harder to manage consistently.
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.
