Tango in history, books, and films

by TCW | Mar 6, 2020 | Uncategorized | 4 comments

My post on tango from a couple of months back is now my fifth most popular post in the two years I’ve been on this blog. It’s odd because people always say they want stuff about history or writing. What to do?

How about I post about tango and history? Or tango and writing? Or, because tango is a fairly visual thing, tango in films?

OK, let’s do that.

Tango in history

Tango doesn’t feature in my books at all, despite the first of my books about James Burke (Burke in the Land of Silver) being set largely in Buenos Aires. That’s because the action takes place early in the 19th century and tango didn’t really start until rather later. According to the famous Argentine tango historian, Horatio Ferrer “the spiritual and artistic genesis of tango took place from about 1880 to circa 1895”.

Tango remained virtually unknown outside South America until the early 20th century. Then it moved to Europe, notably Paris, where it became very fashionable. It spread across the continent, reaching Helsinki just before the First World War, where it developed into the distinctive Finnish Tango that is still popular today. By the 1920s tango was being filmed. Rudolph Valentino was hugely successful with films like The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The tango singer, Carlos Gardel, starred in a series of films from The Lights of Buenos Aires in 1931 until his death in 1935. Many of his films were released by Paramount in the USA and although they were made in Spanish they drew big audiences and moved tango further into the mainstream.

Carlos Gardel’s Grave

Vernon and Irene Castle, who were influential ballroom dancers and teachers at a time when that was pretty much like rock-star status now, adapted the tango to make it more acceptable to conservative American dancers. (They even developed a version where the partners did not touch each other at all.) Eventually their approach developed into ballroom tango, which has only a tangential relationship to Argentine tango, but which remains popular with Strictly fans to today.

Tango in books

One of my favourite books ever is the totally wonderful Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones.It’s a book about life and death, loss and rediscovery and it made me cry, but in a good way. Tango is a central motif of the book and, unlike a lot of fiction about the dance, it’s been written by someone who understands it so well you can practically use it as a teach-yourself book. (Please don’t though. There is no substitute for proper lessons.)

Apart from Here at the End of the World… tango seems strangely absent in European and American literature. Tony Parsons’ Starting Over finds his hero finally redeemed by dance in the milongas of Buenos Aires but most of the fiction that Goodreads files under ‘tango’ has titles like Red Hot Fantasy and Laid Bare. Tango’s reputation for sexual impropriety lives on in books like these.

The Tango Singer is a lovely Argentine book that sees Buenos Aires through the story of a mythical tango singer, though the book (like many Argentinians) concentrates on the songs rather than the dance.

The best accounts of tango in books are through memoirs. Amongst tango dancers the favourite (and quite a succes de scandale when it was published in 2012) is probably Twelve Minutes of Love, a reference to the average length of time a couple will dance together before changing partners. The Bulgarian author, Kapka Kassabova, has travelled round the world behaving disgracefully in tango salons wherever she went and her deliciously indiscreet memoir left red faces from New Zealand to Scotland. Another classic is Long After Midnight at the Nino Bien which is part coming-of-age story and part travelogue as a young American moves to Buenos Aires and falls desperately in love with his tango teacher.

Another memoir, Bad Times in Buenos Aires, is unusual for a story about living in Buenos Aires because the writer cheerfully admits to not being able to dance and not really understanding tango at all. It is, perhaps, a useful antidote to the other books I’ve mentioned.

Tango in films

While tango hardly features in European and American novels, you can scarcely move for tango in the movies. I’ve already mentioned the films of Carlos Gardel and Rudolph Valentino, but Argentina still produces great tango movies. My personal favourite is Tango.

There are plenty of tangos in mainstream US and European films, though. Probably the most well-known is the stunning tango scene in Scent of a Woman.

There are films where tango is central to the plot, like Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango and others where it is only incidental. Often it is used for humour – a favourite of mine is in Addams Family Values (definitely not one for purists!).

I could carry on listing tango movies for a very long time. (I once went to a club where one evening we danced to nothing but film music for hours). It’s probably best not to push my luck now. Do say if you want more.

Happy tango!

Reference

Horatio Ferrer’s classic history of tango is a multi-volume epic that foreign dignitaries may be presented with on State Visits. Ferrer is a poet rather than a historian and it’s not an easy read. The shorter English language version published by Manrique Zago ediciones is not an easy read either, but the illustrations are profuse and gorgeous. Well worth a look if you are interested in the history of tango.

 

A picture is worth 1000 words…

by TCW | Aug 14, 2020 | Uncategorized | 6 comments

… unless you are talking about historical research. Last week’s blog post on the Battle of the Nile was illustrated with a painting by Nicholas Pocock. It looks to me to provide a reasonable representation of the situation as the battle started. In the distance you can see smoke from the cannon at the fort of Abū Qīr which opened fire on Nelson’s fleet as it approached the French from the west. (None of the British ships was damaged). The onshore wind is preventing the French from escaping. The British are about to divide their force into two lines, one of which will move into the clear water between the French fleet and the shore before the lines roll up the French from the west, leading to their dramatic victory.

It’s a nice picture, but not particularly dramatic one. Much more exciting is this one:

This was painted by Thomas Whitcombe in 1816, for a book on Naval Achievements of Great Britain from the Year 1793 to 1817. This wasn’t just some standard oil painting to glorify Britain’s Naval achievements: it was specifically illustrating an account of the battle. Compare it with the other picture. The flags clearly show the onshore wind that trapped the French. We see the British fleet approaching from seaward with the land invisible somewhere behind the French. The French line has started firing from its western end, as it did in real life because that’s the way the fleet approached. Except, of course, the fleet here appears to be approaching from the east. It’s possible, because I’m not a specialist naval historian, that I’ve misunderstood it and that the fleet  somehow managed to hook round, although this seems very unlikely. It’s also not at all what is shown in the previous painting.

This illustrates the danger that paintings pose for all historians. We have to remember that it is rare that the painters were actually present during the actions that they commemorate. Probably one of the most famous images of the battle of Waterloo is the charge of the Scots Greys, Scotland Forever! It was painted by Lady Butler, the wife of Sir William Francis Butler. She painted Scotland Forever! in 1881, 66 years after the battle. She had the advantage of watching her husband’s troops charge during training manoeuvres and she catches the sense of speed and movement very well. Except, of course, that she had never seen an actual battle, let alone watch a regiment moving forward across the churned up mud of the field of Waterloo. The heroic charges were very slow. It’s likely that the horses never reached a full gallop. They certainly didn’t look the way they are shown in the painting.

People have been making historical errors based on pictures of battles ever since we started believing that Harold died at Hastings with an arrow in his eye. (He might have, of course, but it’s more likely that he was supposed to be the guy on the right being hacked down. In any case, the artist wasn’t there and didn’t know.)

Tapisserie de Bayeux – Scène 57 : La mort d’Harold

My personal favourite for misleading historical pictures is this one from a museum in Buenos Aires.

It shows an Argentinian soldier being welcomed by one of the Falkland Islanders who are being liberated from British rule. The historical record suggests this didn’t happen.

I could go on (and on … and on …) but I hope this has made the point. Paintings – even paintings done in the lifetime of some of the combatants – are a spectacularly unreliable source of historical data, yet their hold on our imagination is so great that, even when we have every reason to be suspicious, we are still sure that Harold died with an arrow in his eye.

 

Pink for a girl?

by TCW | Nov 13, 2020 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

As I promised last month, I’m cutting back on the effort that I’m putting into blogging, which has meant book reviews on Fridays instead of separate review blogs on Tuesdays. That, combined with technical problems while I migrated my blog to a new host (some photos are still missing – let me know if there’s any that you want me to replace) has meant a drop-off in the number of visitors. I think people are missing some of the more heavyweight historical blogs, but they do take quite a lot of writing and, frankly, after years of producing them I feel I’m running out of exciting things to say. This week, then, I’m going to return to an old blog post from several years ago which discusses the history of gendered colour choices in clothing. Although I’ve heard some people making a political issue out of this recently, it’s still an interesting subject and an example of the problems that come up in writing historical fiction.

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In Burke in the Land of Silver, I wrote that Burke, on arriving in Buenos Aires, was struck by the fact that the buildings are mostly in shades of red, so that the predominant colour of the city was pink. He turned to his travelling companion, O’Gorman, and said, ‘I see your painters have a feminine touch.’

I put the line in as a mildly amusing introduction to O’Gorman’s explanation that the houses are that colour because the plaster is mixed using blood from the cattle slaughtered in the city, giving some indication of the scale of the cattle industry there.

When my publisher read it, I got a polite note asking me to check if pink was a feminine colour in 1807. It’s another example of the joys and frustration of writing historical novels. Colours seem a particular problem for me – see my post on the colour of Nelson’s flag at the Nile.

It seemed unlikely that Google was going to help, so I went instead to a couple of online groups of historical authors. Within hours, I knew more about gender and colour than I could ever have imagined.

It turns out that the idea of pink for a girl and blue for a boy is a comparatively recent one. In 1918, the advice given to American parents was:

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

My wonderful historical writers chipped in with personal recollections of the same period:

I inherited a box of baby clothes that belonged to my dad and my uncle when my uncle went into a nursing home. They were identical –my uncle and my dad were only 11 months apart–but one set was pink and the other blue-green. They were pretty girly–especially a couple of baby bonnets with satin rosettes and a couple of Spanky MacFarland tams, complete with pompons in blue green and rose pink. I thought they were my aunts but my aunt was eight years younger and her baby clothes were in another box–more Shirley Temple.
I was flabbergasted when dad told me the pink clothes were his. He laughed and showed me baby pictures of him and Uncle George. The pictures were black and white but I recognized the clothes. I had always assumed that the babies in the picture were girls but no.

Part of the thinking that pink was a suitable colour for a boy seems to go back to the time when soldiers wore red coats. Boys would wear pink coats as a (literally) pale imitation of Redcoat uniforms. Back in the late 18th century, pink could be a dashing colour for a man – there’s a nice example HERE. Back then, though, girls often wore pink as well.

Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence 1794. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

They would even use cosmetics to heighten the pinkness of their skin, as detailed in an 1807 advertisement courtesy of the Two Nerdy History Girls blog: 

A. PEARS, Perfumer, No.55, Wells-street, Oxford-street, having, after a variety of experiments, brought to perfection his beautiful ALMONA BLOOM or LIQUID VEGETABLE ROUGE, respectfully presents it to universal attention, as an indispensible Companion to the Toilet, and for the introduction of which he has been so happy to meet with the concurrence of every Admirer of the Female Complection.    This Composition is infinitely superior to all other preparations for admitting a free perspiration, by softening the Skin, preventing Eruptions, and firmly adheres without the least tint being removed so as stain a cambric handkerchief. It is of the consistency of Cream and of a most beautiful light red hue ; but to expaciate on the whole of its excellencies in this contracted space is impossible.

So was pink a feminine colour or not? The answer, it seems, is that at the beginning of the 19th century the question would have appeared quite ridiculous. The idea of associating particular colours with gender is, as far as I can see, a distinctly 20th century preoccupation.

So after a few hours, Burke’s remark changed to ‘I see your painters favour a roseate hue.’

Many thanks to Cat Camacho, my eagle-eyed editor and to all those who piled in with links and comments when I asked for help.

 

1684: the birth of the telegraph

by TCW | Jan 29, 2021 | Napoleonic history | 0 comments

There’s a sort of game that historians play on Twitter. They keep track of the number of their followers by looking at events in the corresponding year. So yesterday my account (@TomCW99) racked up 1684 followers and I got quite excited because 1684 was the year that Robert Hooke invented the semaphore line.

Semaphores crop up in a couple of my books (or at least in the research I did for them).

I first came across a reference to semaphores when I was researching Napoleon’s escape from Elba. One of the French king’s bodyguards, Col Marie Antoine de Reiset wrote in his journal:

An astounding piece of news arrived yesterday. We learnt, by Telegraph, that Bonaparte had landed at Cannes, near Frejus.

The apparent anachronism is explained by the absence of the word ‘electric’ before ‘telegraph’. A check in the trusty Complete Oxford Dictionary (invaluable for historical novelists) gives the original meaning of the word ‘telegraph’ as: “An apparatus for transmitting messages to a distance, usually by signs of some kind.”

This was the idea that Hooke had presented to the Royal Society in 1684. He had intended it for military use, but his ideas were never put into practice. As so often nowadays, an idea that had been invented in Britain was left for another country to develop. Embarrassingly (given that we were about to go to war with them) the nation that did finally produce a workable semaphore system for military use was the French. In 1792, the engineer Claude Chappe developed the first successful optical telegraph. Eventually he and his brothers succeeded in covering France with a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 3,000 miles. 

The British, though, were not far behind.

In Britain, semaphore was used to communicate between London and the fleet. (Note that the English tend to prefer the word ‘semaphore’ to ‘telegraph’ but they are the same thing.) Lines of semaphore towers were constructed. The first ran from London to Deal, Chatham and Sheerness and they were completed by the end of January 1796. The system was judged a great success – signals were said to have travelled from Dover to London, via Deal, in less than seven minutes. A line to Portsmouth, the home of the Navy, was completed in August 1796.

Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower

Semaphore can actually prove a remarkably efficient means of communication. Because of the importance of accurate time-keeping in navigation, it was important that the fleet had access to a reliable time signal and semaphore was used to mark the time at which the Time Ball was dropped at the Greenwich Observatory (marking one o’clock). By 1806, the semaphore line had been extended to Plymouth and the one o’clock signal was sent to the port there and acknowledged back to London in three minutes, an impressive achievement for a round trip of four hundred miles.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, the British were using a system of telegraphs developed by Sir Home Popham to communicate along their defensive forts in the lines of Torres Vedras (which will feature in a future James Burke book). Semaphore masts were installed at key points along the line s. The one shown here is a replica at Fort San Vicente.

The horizontal arms on the mast standing there today are not really long enough. When this was rigged up and working the arm would have stretched out as far as the five posts at the bottom. Ropes would have run from the arm to each of the five posts and balls mounted on these ropes would have carried the message. A model in the museum at the fort shows how it would have been set up.

The shorter arms on the modern reproduction are probably wise. There were problems with the original masts which could not bear the weight of the arms and which had to be replaced.

The system allows the masts to transmit one number at a time from one to 999. Each number corresponded to a word in a codebook enabling vital military messages to be transmitted very quickly. Anybody could see the signals but without the codebook they were meaningless.

Popham (never a man to fail to promote one of his ideas) convinced the Admiralty that his system was an improvement on the one they were using and, after trials with an experimental semaphore line between the Admiralty and Chatham in 1816, and its success helped to confirm the choice, Popham’s system was adopted.

The semaphore system was envisaged as a war-time measure, to be abandoned after the defeat of Napoleon and, indeed, it was run down as soon as he was sent to Elba. Napoleon’s escape, though, led to the system being restored to full effectiveness and it was then kept running until it was superseded by the electric telegraph.

The new-fangled electric telegraph had just started operating in India in 1857, just in time to feature briefly in my book about the Mutiny, Cawnpore. It was telegraph messages that warned the British as soon as the uprising started (the operator who sent the first message was killed for his pains) and without it, events may well have turned out differently and Cawnpore might have had a very different ending.

Acknowledgements

Photo credit: “Chatley Heath Semaphore Tower – geograph.org.uk – 18673” by Nigel Richardson. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chatley_Heath_Semaphore_Tower_-_geograph.org.uk_-_18673.jpg#/media/File:Chatley_Heath_Semaphore_Tower_-_geograph.org.uk_-_18673.jpg

The photograph of the model of the semaphore in use was taken by Roundtheworld and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

 

Why star ratings can damage your reading health.

by TCW | Feb 26, 2021 | Writing life | 12 comments

One blog leads to another

I recently read a blog post from Kate Vane (@k8vane) about how, if you review books, worrying about star ratings messes with the way that you enjoy your reading.

I couldn’t agree more. Just knowing that you are going to have to write a review changes your whole approach to your reading, and not necessarily in a good way. And star ratings are the tool of the devil.

Why I review on my blog

I’ve already blogged about how I was planning to cut back on reviewing. Since I wrote that (just six weeks ago as I write this) I’ve done a couple of book reviews. They take time to write and are in addition to my regular blogs. So why on earth do I do it? In these two cases (and there are more on the way) I was asked to: not necessarily by the author. I get asked to review by authors, publishers and journals and I get books from NetGalley who expect a review in exchange for a regular supply of quality free books. And I like having my books reviewed, so it seems only fair to review books by other writers. Even so, I do often have my doubts. Then I get thanks from a reader who has enjoyed my review or from an author who is grateful for something I have said and then I seem to keep going.

So I write my review. My reviews are quite long and will probably mention things I felt didn’t quite work as well as the things that did. Some authors are less than thrilled at this approach, but the blog post is supposed to be a ‘proper’ review for critical readers. An edited (usually totally positive) version will make its way to Amazon in time. Which is where we meet the evil star system.

Star ratings

By the time it gets to Amazon, my 800 word nuanced blog post has already been reduced to 600 words or less explaining why it’s a good book. (If it isn’t a good book, I’ll generally try not to review it, though I’m happy to make an exception for people like Jacob Rees-Mogg.) But then my 600 words have to be reduced to one of five star ratings. It’s mad.

(The obvious answer is not to post on Amazon, but writers need those Amazon reviews to make sales, so in the end I’m going to post.)

What does it all mean?

Kate (Remember her? She wrote the blog that started this off) is one of those people who avoids 5* ratings.

I only give it 5* if it’s exceptional

A lot of my friends are like that, which is annoying if they are reviewing my books, because analysis of Amazon ratings shows that most people give 5* or (much less often) 1* ratings. Basically, they rate books as ‘Great’ (5*) or ‘Rubbish’ (1*). The middle rankings are less likely to feature.

EDIT
There has been a lot of discussion on this on my Twitter feed so I’m adding this useful summary graph from rendors.com (as posted by them on Quora)

But whether you tend to 4* or 5*, there really aren’t that many options for reviewers like me and Kate. Both of us avoid ratings under 3. She avoids 5 and I avoid 3 (we’ll see why in a moment), so basically both of us end up usually choosing between 3* and 4* (Kate) or 4* and 5* (me). Basically, for most books, my 800 word review has come down to a binary choice.

Interpreting the ratings

Kate gives an explanation of her ratings. 3* is ‘good but flawed’, 4* means she enjoyed it and 5*, as we’ve seen, is ‘exceptional’.

I’ve always been nervous to explain the ratings I give, but here they are:

5* — I recommend this book to anyone reading my review

4* — I think this book is a good read for anyone who likes this genre (“It’s the sort of thing you’ll like if you like that sort of thing.”)

3* — It’s OK

2* — It’s not OK

1* — This book is a disaster.

The horror of the 3* rating

I have a friend who wrote a review of a book of mine, praising it to the skies and then giving it a 3* rating. When I pointed out that she had given it a negative review, she said that of course she hadn’t.

The thing is that if you are rating on Amazon, you are using the Amazon rating system and Amazon considers 3* a “critical” review. People are continually arguing with me about this, but Amazon are totally upfront about it. Click on ‘See all reviews’ for a book and this pops up:

Also remember that (as I said above) the commonest rating on Amazon is 5*. Most books will average somewhere around 4*. Giving them a 3* review will generally pull their rating down and, by and large, I don’t want to pull authors down. So I avoid 3* reviews. You may well feel differently, but just be aware what you are doing. A 3* review is not neutral.

Being nice – or not

This is the nub of the why I personally find the horror of the star rating hanging over me while I read.

I’m happy to say that I think a character is under-developed or that there are some unlikely coincidences holding a plot together. I know that I upset some writers by being critical, but I’m writing a review on my blog for people who are interested in writing. I doubt they will reject a book that I review (remember I generally only review books I like) because I said that I thought there was an unrealistic portrayal of women in the 19th century. It’s pretty well a given nowadays that 19th century women will be portrayed unrealistically: it’s only because I write about the 19th century myself that I either notice or care. But when the review gets onto Amazon people will reject a book because it has a 3* average rating. So what if I think that the portrayal of women as feisty lawyers is just too much to allow a 4* review? (I refused to review a book recently that centred on a woman planning a legal career before the law was changed to allow women lawyers in Britain.) If the book, apart from this one detail that hasn’t worried the publisher and won’t worry most readers, is quite a good read, do I post 3* or 4*? It’s clearly not really worth 4*, but most people aren’t going to be worried by its historical howler, so is it really just ’OK’ and getting the dreaded 3* rating? Or do I say it’s three and a bit and nudge up to four?

In the case of the book I mentioned, my decision was that, as it was likely 3* and I care about basic history, I would not read or review it at all. But there are other cases which are more marginal and there my rule of thumb is ‘always nudge up’. If the author is well-known with a big publisher behind them, then my rating doesn’t matter and I can unleash my inner critical Rottweiler, but self-published authors and writers at small presses rely on those Amazon ratings for their survival. Yes, if they are seriously bad books I will not rate them. If they deserve to be driven out of the writing community I will give them 2* or even 1*. But how many writers are so truly terrible that it is for me (or almost anyone else) to say that they just shouldn’t be writing? Because, as it gets harder and harder to get books seen in a crowded marketplace, a poor star rating can destroy any chance of serious sales. (And, in this context, ‘serious sales’ can mean hitting three figures.)

When I write a review, I can speak as I find. I have annoyed friends by being less than gushing about their work. But they have (mostly) forgiven me. But when I have to produce that wretched, meaningless, frankly obscene, Amazon star rating, I know that I can do real harm. Knowing that can suck some of the pleasure out of the book.

1. 

   Kate Vane on February 26, 2021 at 1:31 pm (Edit)

   Thanks for linking to my post – interesting to read your thoughts as a reviewer and an author.

   Re 3* reviews – the flipside to seeing them as negative is that the top ‘critical’ review on Amazon may be a 3* review, which is better than readers seeing a 2 or even 1* at the top! I guess this is deliberate by Amazon – they want people to buy books after all.

   Reply
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     TCW on February 26, 2021 at 1:34 pm (Edit)

     That’s a good point, but it still leaves me uncomfortable giving 3* reviews (and they do almost always reduce the average rating, which does seem important to potential buyers).

     Reply
2. 

   Berthold Gambrel on February 26, 2021 at 2:08 pm (Edit)

   I couldn’t agree with you more. I loath star rating systems. One of many things I dislike about most review systems, and why I much prefer writing reviews on my blog.

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     TCW on February 26, 2021 at 2:32 pm (Edit)

     Absolutely. But Amazon reviews are so valuable to authors, so there is pressure to post there too. So many writers are not getting the audience they deserve and posting on Amazon can really help them.

     Reply
3. 

   lydiaschoch on March 1, 2021 at 5:04 pm (Edit)

   Honestly, I have mixed feelings about star ratings, too. I wish there were a way to post reviews on places like Amazon and Goodreads without them.

   Reply
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     TCW on March 1, 2021 at 6:04 pm (Edit)

     I’ve just tried posting without a star rating on Goodreads and they seem OK with that. Not Amazon though. What is especially annoying is that Amazon now allow star ratings without a review, which is just WRONG.

     Reply
4. 

   Terry Tyler on March 2, 2021 at 9:32 am (Edit)

   I love that Amazon now allows star ratings without a review… it means getting more ratings (which is better for the book’s visibility, better for how it appears to random browsers), because many who rate would not do so if they had to write a review. I also like star ratings… I think we tend to think too much about it. I give a lot of half stars (‘I like this more than just ‘like’ it, but don’t ‘love’ it’ – or ‘this is not good enough for a 4* because it needs work, but it’s better than average’), then I’ll, say, mark round up on Amazon and down on Goodreads and BookBub. We tend to make up our own minds about what the ratings mean to us, anyway.

   Mine:
   5 stars – only if I can honestly say ‘I loved it’. On my blog, 5 *Gold* stars means ‘exceptional’.
   4 stars – I enjoyed it but didn’t love it. OR, it wasn’t really my bag, but I can see that of its type it’s very good.
   3 stars – A lot wrong, a lot right. OR, potentially very good but needs a lot of work. Or, well-presented and not a lot wrong with it, apart from the fact that it was dead boring.
   2 stars – a bit crap
   1 star – a lot crap.

   I buy loads of books on Kindle, and find the star ratings endlessly useful when making my choices!

   Reply
5. 

   warza on March 2, 2021 at 12:40 pm (Edit)

   I usually give four or five stars to books I finish and none to books that I don’t finish. It’s rare for me to give three stars because I feel cruel doing so. I usually give four or five stars to books I finish, especially those that I finish within a few days or weeks, rather than months and years.
   I don’t like to write reviews about books because I have not practiced the art of review writing. I do like to tweet, talk about and blog when ideas or concepts in books are interesting.
   I often look at titles and descriptions when I choose books, rather than their star rating. With audible I also check the narrator. I have found that sometimes stars are less interesting than the person reading the book. It’s important to check that you can stand the narrator, because you will listen to them for twelve or more hours.
   Would you prefer a thumbs up, rather than a star rating system, like on youtube. I think marking how many people finished e-books would be a good rating system.
   “Only 5 percent of people who bought this book finished reading it”.

   Reply
   • 

     TCW on March 2, 2021 at 2:26 pm (Edit)

     Interesting ideas and broadly in line with my thoughts as far as what star rating to give although I will finish a book and just not review it if I didn’t like it.

     It’s sad that you feel you can’t write reviews. Everybody reviews differently. My reviews are longer than is idea for Amazon where shorter reviews are read more, but we are all allowed to decide how we review. Amazon doesn’t pay us after all!. Reviews do make such a difference to authors and they may miss your tweet or blog. Honestly, you can just paste your tweet into Amazon et voila – a review.

     Given how people use the existing star system a thumbs up/thumbs down rating would make more sense and at least be vaguely consistent from reviewer to reviewer. Maybe Amazon should look at that.

     I’m not sure about recording the percentage read. It obviously can’t work for Kindle Unlimited as many people read a few pages to decide whether or not they want to continue. I don’t get figures on individuals, but I do see that some days I will just get 5 pages read while most days may be hundreds. A always assume the five pages was a ‘taster’ and all it says was that that reader decided it wasn’t a book for them, which is fair enough. It makes more sense with books you’ve bought, but I’m not sure I want Amazon checking on my reading. They know far too much about me already.

     Thanks for your comments anyway. They’re interesting.

     Reply
     • 

       warza on March 2, 2021 at 5:04 pm (Edit)

       If two sentences are enough then I can easily write reviews. That is easy compared to writing blog posts and journaling.