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theblackw0lf posted:How much do people use Goodreads to determine what novels to check out? Goodreads ratings reflect basically nothing about a novel. Goodreads reviews range from gif-filled trash to well-written, thoughtful reviews. Basically I use it and amazon reviews as an aggregate of what the common person thinks of a given book, and use that to determine if it's worth my time.
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Aug 19, 2019 18:35
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Goodreads ratings reflect popularity mostly so if you want to read big mainstream fantasy books it's a good way to find those?
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Aug 19, 2019 18:41
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theblackw0lf posted:How much do people use Goodreads to determine what novels to check out? Goodreads is a lousy rating system. One reason is because people are allowed to rate and even review books that aren't even out yet. Check any highly anticipated release and you'll find craptons of five-star ratings and reviews like "This doesn't come out until December but I'm sure it will be great!!" (Or for the converse, the various YA pile-ons, like when The Black Witch had hundreds of furious one-star reviews before it came out. None of the reviewers had read the book but they KNEW it was evil and bad.) All review systems can be and are easily gamed, but at least Amazon uses the "verified purchase" note so you know a reviewer bought the drat book before sounding off on it.
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Aug 19, 2019 18:45
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theblackw0lf posted:How much do people use Goodreads to determine what novels to check out? Goodreads number ratings is fairly complicated because you have to know the genre and subgenre the book is in and publication date and how popular it is to get a good idea of what the ratings actually mean. Like epic fantasy that's decent will generally be a 4.5 or higher, meanwhile you will be extremely hard pressed to find any sci-fi above 4.5 at all. Generally it's best to overall ignore it. What I would do is. *Fill out and just star rate as many books as you can remember that you have read. *Find some books that are popular or you have a strong opinion on and find reviews that align with you most closely, use the compare feature to see how they line up with what you think is good. Follow the people that line up closely. When just looking at a book you really just have to scroll down to the reviews and I highly recommend reading the first 10 reviews.
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Aug 19, 2019 19:01
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theblackw0lf posted:How much do people use Goodreads to determine what novels to check out? Highest ratings are probably for niche books with a small but enthusiastic readership. Really, Goodreads is not great at recommendations.
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Aug 19, 2019 19:25
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The best way to get book recommendations was to rate the things you read on Amazon and then get their predictive suggestions from your library, unfortunately they don’t let you rate things you haven’t bought from them anymore. Goodreads is averages, not predictive, and thus is completely useless.
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Aug 19, 2019 19:53
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StrixNebulosa posted:Trial by Fire by Charles Gannon, aka Caine Riordan #2: good book, absolutely gigantic scale plot with a lot of moving parts. I enjoyed reading how aliens severely underestimated humanity multiple times. Thanks for this sort-of recommendation, I picked up Caine Riordan #1, Fire With Fire, and I'm enjoying the brisk pace and pulpiness.
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Aug 19, 2019 20:00
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The best way to get recommendations is to read curated book discussion forums !!!
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Aug 19, 2019 20:06
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Ben Nerevarine posted:Thanks for this sort-of recommendation, I picked up Caine Riordan #1, Fire With Fire, and I'm enjoying the brisk pace and pulpiness.  Glad someone read my short post and picked it up. For modern golden age pulp sci-fi they're smart and fun and full of twisty bits.
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Aug 19, 2019 20:10
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I've found that a very reliable way to get recommendations with a high hit rate is to look at the blogs/articles/twitter feeds/whatever of authors I already know I like, and see what books they recommend. So e.g. getting book recommendations from C.J. Cherryh, Seanan McGuire, C.S. Friedman, and Diane Duane has been pretty successful for me.
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Aug 19, 2019 20:15
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The best way to get recommendations is to read curated book discussion forums And to follow the participants on goodreads.
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Aug 19, 2019 20:27
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Space Opera came dead last in the preferences and I am rather glad that my antihype on that got validated. It was fine but not Hugo finalist material at all. Ben Nevis posted:Do we know what the hat thing is? https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1163210202830770176?s=09
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Aug 19, 2019 20:30
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The best way to get recommendations is to read curated book discussion forums
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Aug 19, 2019 20:54
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DACK FAYDEN posted:But where can I find one of those, Friendly Local Moderator?
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Aug 19, 2019 21:01
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DACK FAYDEN posted:But where can I find one of those, Friendly Local Moderator? Funny you should ask! I happen to have a curated book discussion forum right here! For the low low low price of 
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Aug 19, 2019 21:11
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The best way to get recommendations is to read curated book discussion forums I would've never read the Aubrey/Maturin series if it wasn't for this forum, now they're my favorite series of novels ever. I think you recommended Oakley Hall's Warlock and it was great. And now I'm just starting Downbelow Station. Lots of times someone will mention a novel here and I'll wishlist it on Amazon for later.
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Aug 19, 2019 21:25
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StrixNebulosa posted:Goodreads ratings reflect basically nothing about a novel. Goodreads ratings don't reflect much about a novel's quality, but Mark Lawrence figured out there is a very strong correlation between the rating numbers and sales. 
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Aug 19, 2019 22:53
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Megazver posted:Goodreads ratings don't reflect much about a novel's quality, but Mark Lawrence figured out there is a very strong correlation between the rating numbers and sales. That's number of sales vs number of ratings, so it's kind of "yeah, of course that's how it works" at least in my head. If you sell x10 the number of books, you'd expect to have x10 the number of reviews.
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Aug 20, 2019 00:04
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team overhead smash posted:That's number of sales vs number of ratings, so it's kind of "yeah, of course that's how it works" at least in my head. If you sell x10 the number of books, you'd expect to have x10 the number of reviews. This is empirical proof of how it works in your head. I'd be curious to see if it works that way at all levels of sales or just at higher numbers.
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Aug 20, 2019 00:38
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Ben Nevis posted:And to follow the participants on goodreads. This Goodreads is pretty helpful if you have half a clue about what you want already, but terrible for blind hunting Fortunately I have years of books piled up to go so
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Aug 20, 2019 02:14
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theblackw0lf posted:n I ignore Goodreads scores and Amazon ratings entirely. The reason for this is selection bias - unless there is some sort of fandom flamewar going on and a review-bombing campaign gets organized, most people will only review a book if they have read it, and most people will only read a book if they like it. Meaning you can have an awful self-published underaged incest harem fantasy that gets a 4.8 stars on Goodreads because nobody's reviewing it except people who already like that kind of thing. You are better off finding a smaller set of commentators you like and following their blog or whatever they've got. Short fiction athologies are also a good way to find new authors in whatever area of fiction you're interested in. Read the anthology, find the authors you like, then check out their longform work later. You can find anthologies organized by genre, subgenre, topic, theme, period, and so on, meaning you can find one for more or less any purpose. currently i am reading an anthology of russian short fiction all published during the gorbachev regime, which is a lot easier than tracking down a russian literature enthusiast and asking them which books are good from that period for sci-fi and fantasy purposes, the vandermeers have put out a couple of huge, comprehensive anthologies recently that are said to be very good Hieronymous Alloy posted:The best way to get recommendations is to read curated book discussion forums we do get a lot of...sorta...a lot of repetitive or redundant recc requests i think this thread has responded to "I like Iain M Banks...what should I read next??" four or five times this summer alone maybe in any future iterations of this thread the OP can list an FAQ of frequent requests + recommendations or maybe we can make a flowchart PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 02:15
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read North American Lake Monsters namaste
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Aug 20, 2019 02:22
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I use the goodreads collection function to find books similar to a book I already enjoyed. That's really down to the users rather than the site itself, though!
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Aug 20, 2019 02:34
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If I'm buying a book that's on sale that I haven't properly 'vetted', I will check out the 2/3 star reviews on goodreads to see if the issues people have with the book are things that I dislike about bad books. As others have mentioned, the overall score isn't a great predictor of quality, but you can get a good idea if you selectively skim through the reviews of a book you are on the fence about.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:04
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fritz posted:That would have been the years when Pratchett's US distribution was absent. (After 'Witches Abroad' there was a long gap during which nothing was coming out over here, the very first thing I bought over the internet was a couple UK-only Pratchett books from a specialty bookstore and even then I had to call them on the phone to give them the credit card.) Kurtz was the dernyi (sp) books, right? Haven’t thought about those in a million years. gvibes fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 03:12
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Ornamented Death posted:This is empirical proof of how it works in your head. I'd be curious to see if it works that way at all levels of sales or just at higher numbers.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:43
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gvibes posted:Kurtz was the dermyi (so) books, right? Haven’t thought about those in a million years. Yep. I revisited them earlier this year and they hold up pretty well for something I read and enjoyed in middle school. (She’s also written a new trilogy in the setting in the interim.)
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Aug 20, 2019 03:54
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PupsOfWar posted:I ignore Goodreads scores and Amazon ratings entirely. Amazon's ratings are machine learning predictions of how much you'll like it.
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Aug 20, 2019 04:29
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Goodreads for me is only occasionally useful for getting recommendations and only then from the carefully curated tastemakers I follow who write good reviews. What I find it really useful for is marking things "want to read," so I can look at something and think "huh that sounds kind of interesting" and bookmark it away and maybe buy it or get it from the library five years down the track. I think I have about 500 books on my want to read shelf. edit - also I do find the ratings somewhat useful; anything below 3.5 probably is pretty dire, since they skew higher because most people aren't going to read a book they don't expect to enjoy. The only books which are massive enough phenomenon to receive really high ratings from all and sundry usually have a high enough profile for me to know a bit about them and know whether they're likely to be to my taste or not. That can mean either classics of literature or huge pop culture books; for example tied for first place out of the 1000+ books on my combined read/to read shelf, with an average rating of 4.56 each, are Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban, and If This Is A Man by Primo Levi. Both fun beach reads, as I understand it. freebooter fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 14:05
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Tokamak posted:If I'm buying a book that's on sale that I haven't properly 'vetted', I will check out the 2/3 star reviews on goodreads to see if the issues people have with the book are things that I dislike about bad books. As others have mentioned, the overall score isn't a great predictor of quality, but you can get a good idea if you selectively skim through the reviews of a book you are on the fence about. I do this in the library. If's is <3.4 I probably won't bother with a book if I don't know the author or have some independent recs for it. Though I've read a surprising number of low 3 books. In fact, looking back, I'm genuinely surprised to find some that low. Oh well.
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Aug 20, 2019 15:11
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A collection of Andre Norton's Witch World books (the High Hallack ones?) is in the daily deal on Amazon. How are they? I've never read any Norton. Annoyingly it looks like the collection has (among other books) the first and third book in a trilogy, but not the second one, but otherwise it seems like a steal.
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Aug 20, 2019 15:50
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I haven't read those since I was ten. When I was ten they were pretty solid. edit: I may be confusing them in my memory with Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels zimmer bradley is considerably more problematic now than I was aware she was when I was ten Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 15:55
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I haven't read those since I was ten. She liked you more when you were ten, too.
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Aug 20, 2019 16:36
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Drone Jett posted:She liked you more when you were ten, too. 
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Aug 20, 2019 16:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:edit: I may be confusing them in my memory with Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels Those weren't solid even when I was in high school with her grandkids.
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Aug 20, 2019 17:59
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i respect that a lot of people have wrestled at length with the question of whether you can continue enjoying a great author's work after you know they were an awful human being MZB is not even good though, so it's moot in her case andre norton still holds up if you're into golden age adventure stories, and didn't do any crimes so far as I know
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Aug 20, 2019 18:54
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mllaneza posted:Those weren't solid even when I was in high school with her grandkids. In retrospect almost everything cool about darkover was stolen from The King in Yellow or somewhere else
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Aug 20, 2019 18:58
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I've been tearing through Kameron Hurley's Light Brigade and enjoying it a great deal - how does the rest of her work stack up?
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Aug 20, 2019 20:33
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Currently reading The Luminous Dead, I think I saw it recommended in here. I might drop it. I like the concept, but the main characters strike me as insufferable adult children.
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Aug 20, 2019 21:04
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Does anybody have any decent recommendations for science fiction focused on or limited to the solar system? I've been reading a lot of space opera lately and I feel like I need something more local, but there's only so many times a human being can reread Blindsight. I haven't tried The Expanse because the TV show was awful, but ... maybe?
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Aug 20, 2019 21:25
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