Re: Do you rate/review books you didn't finish?
Posted: 19 Aug 2023, 01:17
As an author of hundreds of publications and around a dozen books, an editor for a major publisher (books and journals), and a professor of linguistics, I always aim to be instructive and constructive. Still, I have quite a few times failed to finish a book and still provided a review and a rating. Exactly what I have done depends on the precise situation but I do always aim to explain where I got up to, why I didn't finish it, and why I am giving it the rating I do - which is not always one star.
One situation is where it is an ARC or other assigned/bid review, and I or the author/publisher can select that the review is not made public but only goes to the author/publisher. I am under no obligation to spend my valuable time (perhaps $1000-worth for novel-length books) finishing a book that does not suit my tastes or is not up to scratch. If the issue is not to my taste, I might give a mid-level rating and explain why I didn't like the book and which readers it may and may not be suitable for. If the issue is the writing, it is likely to get one or two stars - one star if the book is supposedly professionally published and/or edited or by an established author, but aiming to be lenient and helpful to inexperienced authors. Note that I won't be pedantic about formatting, spelling or grammar issues/preferences in an ADVANCED Review Copy since these are by definition not the final edit and not formatted as the actual publication (which may indeed be in a totally different format, e.g. ePub vs single- or double-spaced PDF). My job is to review the story as presented.
More generally, the same principles pertain for published/bought/borrowed books, and I do want to warn readers who will not like the book, help the inexperienced authors, and send a message to the editor/publisher. In particular, I have quite broad tastes and read a lot, and I am particularly disappointed when big name authors or publishers serve up tripe. When I am pointing out problems, I feel it is reprehensible, unhelpful and dishonest to be vague and just say there were lots of problems. It is important to make clear whether they were with the plot, the structure, the characters, the spelling/grammar/idiom/register or the publishing/genre conventions - and give specific examples. But reviewers are not editors or proofreaders - it is not our job to identify all the examples, which can run to thousands. Our job is to review the story as presented.
I have received reviews claiming there were many factual errors, spelling errors or grammatical errors where no examples were given and I couldn't find one (nor my reading/proofing team). I have received reviews where the objections amounted to me not following US/Webster spelling or (the highly deprecated, often ill-advised and somewhat out of date) Chicago Manual of Style — the New York Times Style Manual is much better, although I myself follow modern British conventions. Plus, as a reviewer, I try not to be petty about mere matters of convention where I have a different preference and house style (this includes matters related to punctuation, quotation and indentation).
Unfortunately many so-called professional editors/proofreaders actually introduce errors (e.g. always writing 'Someone and I' even in contexts that should be accusative: 'us' not 'we'). The issues of grammar can be particularly tricky when we have dialogue or inner thought where a character may use poor grammar. But the narrator shouldn't, and authors, editors and publishers should be illustrating good practice rather than bad, particularly in books for Children, Middle Graders and Young Adults. Word and Grammarly can also introduce errors (there was one international student where I kept correcting the same errors in draft after draft and it turned out she was using Grammarly, which put them back in).
Ironically my team developed, and published on, the first system for grammatically-sensitive spelling correction, implemented for MS Word (and Microsoft quizzed me closely about it at the conference talk, sometime last century). The state of the art has improved considerably since then but is far from perfect, and the latest GPT technologies often get things wrong too.
One situation is where it is an ARC or other assigned/bid review, and I or the author/publisher can select that the review is not made public but only goes to the author/publisher. I am under no obligation to spend my valuable time (perhaps $1000-worth for novel-length books) finishing a book that does not suit my tastes or is not up to scratch. If the issue is not to my taste, I might give a mid-level rating and explain why I didn't like the book and which readers it may and may not be suitable for. If the issue is the writing, it is likely to get one or two stars - one star if the book is supposedly professionally published and/or edited or by an established author, but aiming to be lenient and helpful to inexperienced authors. Note that I won't be pedantic about formatting, spelling or grammar issues/preferences in an ADVANCED Review Copy since these are by definition not the final edit and not formatted as the actual publication (which may indeed be in a totally different format, e.g. ePub vs single- or double-spaced PDF). My job is to review the story as presented.
More generally, the same principles pertain for published/bought/borrowed books, and I do want to warn readers who will not like the book, help the inexperienced authors, and send a message to the editor/publisher. In particular, I have quite broad tastes and read a lot, and I am particularly disappointed when big name authors or publishers serve up tripe. When I am pointing out problems, I feel it is reprehensible, unhelpful and dishonest to be vague and just say there were lots of problems. It is important to make clear whether they were with the plot, the structure, the characters, the spelling/grammar/idiom/register or the publishing/genre conventions - and give specific examples. But reviewers are not editors or proofreaders - it is not our job to identify all the examples, which can run to thousands. Our job is to review the story as presented.
I have received reviews claiming there were many factual errors, spelling errors or grammatical errors where no examples were given and I couldn't find one (nor my reading/proofing team). I have received reviews where the objections amounted to me not following US/Webster spelling or (the highly deprecated, often ill-advised and somewhat out of date) Chicago Manual of Style — the New York Times Style Manual is much better, although I myself follow modern British conventions. Plus, as a reviewer, I try not to be petty about mere matters of convention where I have a different preference and house style (this includes matters related to punctuation, quotation and indentation).
Unfortunately many so-called professional editors/proofreaders actually introduce errors (e.g. always writing 'Someone and I' even in contexts that should be accusative: 'us' not 'we'). The issues of grammar can be particularly tricky when we have dialogue or inner thought where a character may use poor grammar. But the narrator shouldn't, and authors, editors and publishers should be illustrating good practice rather than bad, particularly in books for Children, Middle Graders and Young Adults. Word and Grammarly can also introduce errors (there was one international student where I kept correcting the same errors in draft after draft and it turned out she was using Grammarly, which put them back in).
Ironically my team developed, and published on, the first system for grammatically-sensitive spelling correction, implemented for MS Word (and Microsoft quizzed me closely about it at the conference talk, sometime last century). The state of the art has improved considerably since then but is far from perfect, and the latest GPT technologies often get things wrong too.