Etiquette of Book Reviews

I have a cold today, which is making me a little crabby, so once again I'm going to talk about books.

There's a website I really like called Goodreads.  It lets you rate and keep track of the books that you are reading as well as seeing what books your friends are reading.   The only problem I have is figuring out how to rate books in a public forum.  The site uses a five star system and then allows you to add a review.  The stars are problematic, since I end up giving about 70% of books that I read three stars, which not only seems a little mean, but also ends up lumping "great books with problems" into the same category as "throwaway easy reads".   

The natural solution to that problem seems to be to write a review.  However, I recently read a blog post by an bestselling author who talked about the danger of unpublished writers writing nasty book reviews in a public forum. Apparently it's cost people representation from agents, and very awkward moments if they ever meet these authors.   I don't think any of my reviews were nasty, and even here on my blog while ranting about specific genres I've been careful not to name names.  Still one person's "thoughtful comment" is another person's "nasty review" so I went in and stripped all of my reviews out of the site.

Then today I was entering the information for Terry Pratchchett's I Shall Wear Midnight.  The book had an extremely slow start, but I ended up loving it in the end.  I felt like, in all fairness, it was another "three star" book.  However, to just slap the star rating on it and walk away seemed like a disservice to the book.  So once again I wrote a review - two lines, focusing on the positive.  At the risk of being Pollyanna I think that's going to be my new method, only write a review if I can focus on the positive.

The only thing that's really clear to me in all of this is that I should never underestimate my ability to over-think an issue.