SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Curious how other vet a book?

I look up reviews first and hit amazon first (easy to find)
and I read the lowest reviews first.

I just looked at "To Good to Leave, To Bad to Stay" - and found the lowest reviews - revealing.

"Religious based" - "Guide on how to justify leaving marriage" - etc.

OTOH - I bought "The Body Keeps the Score" and reading the worse amazon reviews - got the idea the posters had little interest ing serious thinking.

I read the whole book and I will say it is a difficult read - not up with "Solid State Physics" but takes some thinking to read
successfully.
I found it helpful understanding my long term emotions regarding my "cheater"

How do you vet a book?

I will usually check Amazon and read low, middle and high reviews. I will also read the author's bio. Most of the time, I will also Google the title to see what other reviews are out there. Goodreads is usually a place I'll check for reviews.

With some books, I will also go to YouTube to see if the author has any videos. I'll watch some to see if there are any red flags on some of their other items.

I joined an online book group called LibraryThing in 2007. It lets you create a database of your library with rankings, reviews, tags and ratings. There are millions of users, and a lot of them are librarians, authors, and serious readers. They can be harsh but fair critics of books and you can get an idea how good a book is by looking at the rating summary and reading the reviews.

A lot of my reading friends use Goodreads, but I was already a few years into LibraryThing and prefer it for a reading resource. My experience with Amazon reviews is that there is always a contingency that both loves and hates every book. I reported one reviewer for giving every book he read, dozens and dozens of them, one star and scathing reviews, including a number of the classics. What a tool….

Anyway, if you are really interested in crowd sourced book reviews, I can’t say enough about LT, and it has given me so many great reading recommendations.

Happy reading!

PS it’s free!

[This message edited by whatisloveanyway at 4:16 PM, Thursday, February 22nd]

I have goodreads and have not looked at reviews there

going to look up "Library Thing" - sounds more like what I'm looking for

Thank You Both!

I usually read the lowest rating reviews first. I look carefully at the language the writer uses to see if they are literary minded and know what they are writing. If there are misspellings or incorrect language usage, I ignore them as being serious.

Then I look at the highest ratings. If there are embellishments I ignore those also.

In other words, I try to find intelligent writers who are realistic in their assessment of the book.

I believe Goodreads is an Amazon company now. Thanks for the librarything reco, though it, too, is partly owned by Amazon through Abebooks.