Goodreads: Book Reviews

I finished the night circus. Honest review… would I recommend it? Yes. it’s a super cute book. Would make a great PG movie that’d I’d absolutely go see. There’s no like crime/death/or sex. It’s slow to start, and it’s slightly hard to follow, it’s set in the late 1800’s and at the beginning of the chapters it gives you the dates/timeline that, that particular chapter is at, it jumps back and forth a bit so you just have to pay attention to the dates or you’ll get confused. I don’t recommend the audiobook, I listened and read it. Idk I feel like because you have to watch the dates, and then the person reading the book is an old like monotone man, it just makes it that much more confusing. I prefer audiobooks that are narrated by a man and a female, or someone who at least alters the range of their voice for the different people talking. Grandpa don’t do that. One of the things that really caught me when I was thinking about reading it, was the reviews, everyone remotely said the same thing about the book, that you never see the end coming and OH MY GAWD were they right. I did spend a good portion of time wondering if I liked the book. But kept in the back of my mind what everyone kept saying about the ending and I feel like it’s the ending that ties everything together and takes a book that you’re like “ehh idk 🤷🏼‍♀️“ to “okay!! Wow!” It brings a new meaning to ‘it’s all worth it in the end!”

What I like: I love that this app seems to have every book you can think of and it also has multiple editions of each book if you like being able to log the specific book you read and/or see an accurate progress progression %. I also like that there are multiple book recommendation lists as well as algorithmic recommendations based on books you’ve read. You can even follow authors and get alerted when there are giveaways for their books and when there is new releases. I really find it useful that if the book is part of a series, the app lists the name of the book series along with the book# under the book title, and it’s not only a reference, you can actually click on it and it takes you to a list with all the books from that series, which makes looking for more books in the series much easier than searching through all the books by that specific author. Room for growth: I would like to be able to rate books with half star increments, so it’s a bummer that’s not a feature. The recommendation lists have hundreds of books listed that I can’t possibly look through in one sitting, so it would be nice if there was a way to bookmark where I left off on a list instead of having to try and scroll through it all again. And it would be helpful to have additional options in search criteria, e.g. searching for books by star ratings, or by number of ratings, etc. Also, features for book clubs and book discussions would be worth looking into for many people.

Don’t get me wrong this app is helpful and I use it all the times but it can be pretty clunky sometimes The featured booklists on your page are kinda tricky to find again and I wish there was a whole tab for them with like recently viewed lists and recommendations and things like that because when you accidentally leave an amazing list and can’t find it it’s the worst. The biggest issue I have is it’s not the most new user friendly. I got this app and had so many books and shelves to create for my previous reads but it takes five clicks to add a book to a shelf. When I make a shelf it’s because I realize I have lots of books similar and so scrolling through my reads and clicking five times for each is not fun at all and takes all day. I wish there was a select tool so you could add multiple books to a shelf at a time this would probably make this review five stars. Another little issue I have (and maybe I just can’t figure it out) is Re reading. If I read a book multiple times why can’t I count both towards my reading challenge? It won’t be an accurate page count if it turns out that was just the one of the times I read the book that year. I feel like you should have multiple reading dates on your book info so it isn’t just showing the last time you read it. If this is a feature and I just haven’t found it then I apologize. Definitely needs a refresh I just looked at version history and it’s mostly bug fixes! This app NEEDS something new