Best Book Review Sites

(by Claire Davis)

E-readers offer many conveniences when shopping for books online. One of the things that they cannot replicate, however, is that of book-browsing. You all know that feeling: entering a shop lined with novels, wandering between its aisles and touching the shiny new covers. You stop on occasion, pulling a chosen one down from the shelf, flicking through its pages and reading the blurb. After a pleasant perusal, you leave the shop clutching a promising new novel under your arm, or perhaps with a list of your next ten reads.

So in a digital world where book-browsing is less feasible, how do we know which book is our next page-turner? The answer, of course, is to read online reviews (as Joel blogged about last week!). Here are the top 5 book review sites that  The Bookshelf puts its faith in, so that the next time you’re lost in book-browsing cyberspace, you know where to turn before hitting that buy button.

What's the point of a book review?

It might, after more than a month of reviewing books, be an odd time to question the purpose of a book review.  Hopefully you’ll have read some of our existing efforts, and with any luck you’ll think we’ve understood our task relatively successfully, so why stop to worry about it now?

Well, to start with it seems there are two very distinct audiences for a book review, and they serve two very different purposes.  Sometimes a review will be read by someone who is wondering whether or not they should read a book (or watch a film, or listen to an album…), and sometimes they will find a reader who has already read the work in question and wants to compare their experiences with someone new.  Of course, there are also those who read book reviews in a desperate attempt to write a semi-informed essay on a book they haven’t read, but it’s hard to legislate for them.