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Old 01-04-2011, 11:16 PM   #2
ATDrake
Wizzard
ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ATDrake ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
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Join Date: Mar 2010
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Personally, I suspect astroturfing in the case of those excerpt reviews.

And if a book were so unlikeable or bad (these two are not necessarily the same) that I couldn't finish it, I would feel free to review it if sufficiently moved to do so, but I'd disclaimer it up front with the fact that I was unable to finish the book for whatever reason.

Though more likely I'd figure the book had wasted enough of my time already that I needn't dwell on it any further in any way, much less to somehow validate the author's whatever-it-is with a review.

I do appreciate reviews which state that the reviewer did not finish reading the book and detail the reasons why. Most of the cases I've seen it on were because the writing was horribly, terribly bad in some way.

Usually either very poor technical writing skills (sentence construction, grammar, homophone confusion), or very poor characterization and plotting skills (despicably unsympathetic "heroes" who do despicably unsympathetic things that the reader is apparently supposed to approve of and cheer on, Ye Olde Chaine of Unbelievable Deus Ex Machina Bailout Coincidences, and so forth).

I like knowing exactly what I might want to avoid. Plus, sometimes those sorts of reviews are kind of fun to read if they inspired fed-up ranting.
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