Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: If you read a book you ended up hating, would you stay away from future books by that author, or would you give them a second chance?
I'm going to make a distinction here between books I read just because I want to, and books I read because I have agreed to review them. I generally try to only agree to review books that I think I will enjoy on some level, and reject a fair number of books that are offered to me for that purpose simply because I don't really think that I will find the experience of reading them to be rewarding. To be blunt, I would prefer to read and review books that I like, because it is quite simply a better experience. There is some cathartic enjoyment to be gotten out of writing a review laying into a really bad book after suffering through reading it, but all things considered, I'd rather skip having to read bad books.
However, sometimes my powers of prognostication fail me, and I end up with a book in my hands that I agreed to review that is also deeply flawed in some way, and I have to struggle through it. For the most part, if I agree to review a book that is part of a series, I try to make an effort to read through the series, at least up through the point that the book in question appears. This means that in some cases (and anyone who wants to figure out what those cases might be can go through the reviews I have done of book series and see which ones I really didn't like) I have slogged through several books by one author just to get to the one book I agreed to review and be able to place it in proper context.
To a lesser extent, when I am reading books that have been nominated for some of the major awards in genre fiction that happen to be part of a series, I also try to read all the books in that series, so I can place them in proper context when I write my reviews of them. This is especially true of books that have been nominated for the Hugo Award, as I am a voter for that award, and I want to be able to accurately judge the nominated works before I cast my ballot.
That said, when I am reading books that I have simply picked up to read, if the book is not good, I am much less likely to go back to that same well again in the future.
Previous Book Blogger Hop: Scipio Africanus Defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C.
Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Peugeot 204 Was the Best-Selling Car in France from 1969 Through 1971
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