Let’s Talk Bookish: Do You Read Reviews and Spoilers Before or After?

Hey, everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. This is my first LTB post of the year and I anticipate many more in the coming months. This was my highest category for posts last year, so I’m curious to find if that happens this year too.

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits where we discuss various topics and share our opinions. Today’s topic is Do You Read Reviews and Spoilers Before or After? (suggested by Jillian @ Jillian the Bookish Butterfly).

Prompts: Do you like looking at reviews for books before you read them? Is reading reviews important to you when choosing what books to read next? Or do you prefer to wait until after you’ve read a book to look at reviews? Do you ever look at spoilers before you read a book?

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I almost always look at reviews before reading a book. I want to get a feel for what to expect and whether to have higher or lower expectations. Content warnings are something that I always look at; I don’t have an issue with many things, but I like to know what will be in the story ahead of time.

Reading positive reviews will tend to push a book closer to the top of my TBR. If a book is getting a ton of hype and attention, I’ll want to read it sooner. Staying in the loop with new releases and popular books is hard; I usually don’t end up reading them until a while later. Some of the books that got pushed to the top of my TBR from all the attention were These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, Heartstopper by Alice Oseman, and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson. These three series all got an incredible amount of attention and hype over the past few years.

There are so many books that I have on my TBR that have been praised over and over. Specifically, I’m thinking about Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I haven’t read that yet, and lots of people tell me I need to. I haven’t read anything in the Grishaverse, so I need to start with Shadow and Bone first. I have it on my bookshelf, so hopefully I get to it soon.

Reading reviews also influences my decision on whether I want to buy the book physically, or check it out on Libby. I generally don’t buy books if they have a lower rating on Goodreads, because my expectations are lower, and I don’t want to buy a book I might not like. Of course, there are times when books have a lower rating and I end up loving it, or when books have a higher rating and I end up disliking it.

Spoilers are something I try not to look at until after I’ve read the book. Sometimes I get spoilers by accident when I look at reviews or go to wiki pages. I have gotten spoiled on a character dying from their “status” on a wiki page. I was disappointed and the character death wasn’t as impactful when it actually happened since I was expecting it.

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Do you read reviews before reading a book? What about spoilers?