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February 3: Do You Read Reviews and Spoilers Before or After? (Jillian @ Jillian the Bookish Butterfly)
Prompts: Do you like looking at reviews for books before you read them? Is reading reviews important to you when choosing what books to read next? Or do you prefer to wait until after you’ve read a book to look at reviews? Do you ever look at spoilers before you read a book?
Welcome to another week of LTB here at DTRH, everyone! It’s the first LTB of February so that’s pretty exciting. Today’s topic is a great one, and I really wonder if people will share my opinion on it. Without further ado, let’s begin.
I don’t usually like looking at reviews for books before reading just because I find it a bit of a hassle. Although, if there’s a blogger I really like or usually agree with, I do take those reviews with more weight. However, in general, I like to read the synopsis and look at the book, the title, and the cover, and just kind of see if I am drawn to it. If I am, that kind of forms part of the expectations going in, which I think is fair. Every book has readers who didn’t like it and readers who did like it, so I don’t find too much value from reviews (i.e., ratings) to help me decide on whether to read something. A book can not be rated 5-star by anybody and still be worth reading!
So I kind of answered the next prompt accidentally but I stand by the same statement. It isn’t important to me because I don’t find that I derive a lot of value from it. Answering the next question, I do prefer to wait until I’ve read it to look at reviews and what everyone else thought about it so that I’m not too biased going in. After all, sometimes the hype and expectations of a book is exactly what ruins it! Or at least lowers its perception. I do like finding my own opinion of a book while reading it before finally looking at what others have to say. And when I do, that’s when I can agree or disagree with the general populace, or try and figure out what some people liked and what some other people didn’t like. It’s always so interesting why people like or dislike a book, there are literally so many reasons.
I don’t generally read spoilers before I read a book, but I don’t mind them. Sometimes in a recommendation I’ll also ask my friends to mini-spoil it for me (e.g., does it have a happy ending, etc.). I find that personally, while reading a book, I will be quite absorbed into it and find that I am still shocked by things I explicitly knew, so I never found spoilers to be troublesome (same with spoilers in movies, actually!). So sometimes I want the guarantee of an ending or a style or something else, which warrants a spoiler from someone. Sometimes it’s the spoiler itself with no context that really makes me want to read something to find out more about it—anyone else get that? But generally I won’t go intentionally looking for spoilers before reading a book.
How about you all? Spoilers no spoilers? Reviews? If you do look at reviews before reading, are there certain people you trust to review and share the same tastes? Or do you take an average of what everyone says to decide whether something is worth reading? Let me know in the comments below!
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