It is not possible to read all the Sci-Fi books out there. So you must have a process for selecting what you do read. Reading a book is an investment in your time. Your time is valuable. No one wants to waste that time reading unworthy books.
I have never codified my criteria. And it has changed and evolved over time. I suspect it will continue to change moving forward, as who I am tomorrow is not who I was yesterday.
What is your criteria to date?
Mine is that it must meet ALL the following criteria, some objective and some subjective.
- it must have at least 1,000 reviews
- it must have at least 70% 5-star reviews
- if after reading about it I get the suspicion that it’s a romance disguised as Sci-Fi, I automatically reject it no matter what
- if it’s YA, it really needs to be exceedingly compelling to choose it
- Space Opera also needs to be exceedingly compelling
- if I get the feeling it’s trying to preach I’ll reject it
- if i get the feeling it has (messaging, strong opinions, or political overtones) about today’s societal issues, I probably won’t choose it. Not judging; I primarily read for escapism.
I guess that’s about it. There’s probably more but I just haven’t put that much thought into it yet.
I’m very interested in how y’all decide to choose a book to spend your valuable time reading.
I agree it’s not possible to read everything, but I promise that if you are a habitual reader, you will run out of truly excellent books to read really rapidly. Both because there just aren’t that many and because everyone’s tastes are different.
These days my criteria is: if I heard of the book and it sounds interesting to me I’ll try it. If it fails to capture me within a chapter or two I’m putting it down.
I have a strong preference for queer books (especially queer scifi) and will totally overlook even dramatically negative reviews to read those. But that’s the only bias I have in my selection.
Queer authors and/or characters and themes. There’s a fair amount of scifi like this as people have used the genre to explore gender and sexuality basically from the start. Historically, think Ursula Le Guin in Left Hand of Darkness. For more recent examples, consider A Memory Called Empire by Arcady Martine or Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.
That is quite a restrictive list.
I generally go for:
Is it by an author I like? Is it well written? (Judging by samples).
Then I start to read. Normally I will make it to the end, even if some way in I decide I don’t like it that much. Sometimes I will just give up, if it is too tedious, or too many characters/plots I can’t keep track of, or it turns out to be badly written after all.
Too restrictive? Yes maybe so. There are always exceptions which I haven’t verbalized in my post.
Nevertheless, I fear if I used your method, in total I’d spend years reading samples. It’s good it works for you though.
I read so much, I just don’t have time to invest in reading samples.
UPDATE: I’ve been wondering why the down votes. I suspect there is tone in my response which I did not intend. I get a lot of recommendations I want to weed through to find something I’m interested in. I couldn’t possibly read all the samples. That’s all I’m saying.
The cover
First off the concept, as introduced on the back of the book, or in book-yakking circles (like this) or such must be something that interests me in some way. This means that if the books seems too political in focus (“left” or “right”), for example, I don’t engage. That’s not what I read SF books for.
Second, if the concept intrigues, I have to get a hint that it isn’t just a rehashing of something I’ve already read. I need to read a new take on a concept, not Yet Another Evil Empire Cut Down By Rebels space opera, complete with laser swords, say…
Third, if it gets to this stage, I’ll find a free ecopy somewhere and I’ll read the first 50 pages in a “try before you buy” thing. The author has to grab my interest in 50 pages, no more. If by page 50 I’m not sufficiently intrigued that I’m willing to shell out money, I don’t shell out money. The ebook is deleted and the book is put into my mental “do not enage” bin alongside books whose very concepts don’t interest me.
If, however, by page 50 the book intrigues me, I’ll start the difficult task of hunting down hardcopy and buy it when I find it.
Play Books has ~50pg samplers for just about everything I’ve been on the fence about. If it’s got me by 50pg in I’m probably interested enough to read the rest of it. They (Play Books) don’t always have the best eBook quality so I try to buy from Barnes and Noble when I can but I end up buying a lot of ~$2 sale books on the play store as well.
Play is not accessible to me; that’s not an avenue I can travel down. I basically have to pirate as a try-before-I-buy thing.
And I don’t buy e-books for reading. (I’ll by them for reference works, game rules, etc. but not reading books.) I buy books. It’s a quirk of mine.
If I’m interested. I open it up to a random page. And read a paragraph. And look at the tone of the author, the quality of the writing, on the quality of their content. And then I make a determination if I’ll read the rest of the book
