If all of the glowing blurbs on a novel's dust jacket are from other authors, it'll most likely suck.
If the cover looks like this: [World famous author] Title and [Some Guy you've Never Heard Of] it will most assuredly suck.
To be honest, I don't even pay attention to any of the kind words attesting to the novel's brilliance. I'm yet to see a single book that isn't plastered with hollow words from authors and publications I don't care about.
I hunt for books via author interviews. But the interviews are ones given by successful authors, authors whose work is proven to my liking. There's always a point in the interview when the author is asked what she/he is reading right now or recently.
The blurbs by other authors are virtually meaningless. Often those authors haven't even read the book. Many times they're repped by the same agent, and the agent has asked them to give a blurb. The author tells them to write one and they'll sign off on attaching their name. (Or something similar).
Any novel which contains a two-page list of characters and the relationships among them will be too complicated to follow and most likely won't be worth reading, anyway. Same goes for maps.
I wasn't a fan of name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss (though I found it promising that a debut fantasy author got published. Even though there are MANY debut authors....every time I see a fantasy one it gives me hope), but I noticed that the first comment on amazon was by none other than Robin Hobb (although admittedly I doubt I'd want to read any of her stories, given one book has a character who says less than fifty words in the entire book, and only one word per dialogue). When I checked out the reviews by Hobb....every book she reviewed she gave five stars to....all except for two: 1. A book she gave FOUR stars 2. A book that rips off her name/work by publishing wikipedia entries I'd HEARD that authors engage in flattering one another's works and such to garner a reader base but.....I would've thought it'd be authors I'd never even heard of, not the well known ones. I DO kind of have sympathy because a good book could easily get ignored by folks who'd never have heard of it otherwise but....I mean still...... As for maps....well....I remember when I read a large series of books on a character, that I was curious to understand the length of their journey, so I looked it up on a map myself (would've KINDA made it easier if they'd added the necessary part of the map themselves with a line indicating the journey....a clear map, none of that crap you have to decipher).
I would have to agree with @Void here, maps are great in a fantasy book, even complicated ones. I can give you a couple of examples, The Dragonlance series has an extensive array of maps available usually at the beginning of the books and even though you skim through them at first, later on when a location is mentioned I it a pleasure for me to go back to the map and track it down.
I don't pay attention to blurbs or reviews or anything said by people I don't personally know. I also don't pay attention to generalizations about what makes a book good or bad.
I usually just read the book and make up my own mind about it. What other people have to say doesn't really matter to me. They may like it, but I might not.
You can't guarantee that a book is going to be either good or bad by the limited factors set forth in this thread.
I know a lot of authors who will only publicly review books they enjoyed. So it's not that they're lying in their reviews, it's just that they're following a "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" policy.
I enjoy a lot of books that Stephen King recommends or reviews. In fact, I've found a lot of them to be better than his own. Oh, and in the spirit of this thread: If a book lands face up when you drop it, it will most assuredly suck. If the book sinks when you throw it in the lake, it will most assuredly suck. If it has an odd number of pages, it will most assuredly suck. Finally, if the book in question doesn't fall into any of those categories, or the initial tests are inconclusive, just ask @Lemex to tell you the book will most assuredly suck. Spoiler: Lemex "Yes, this is a book. And yes, this book most assuredly sucks."
Probably, but it's interesting bullcrap. Full of nutrients and life - it just depends on if you want to examine the crap through a microscope. Yes, this is right. My word is law.
Stream of consciousness. Now, there's a lot of interesting in that type of "bullcrap". I mean if you try to get deep into it and understand the orgin of the thinking you might realize something you never thought of yourself.
A good litmus test in deciding if a book is good is asking oneself "Would Hegel think this book is good?" In other words, the answer is always "no."
My approach is slightly different, it's WWDT, or 'What Would Dante Think?' This annoyed me so much once! I tried to read Tom Clancy's complete novels when I was very young, and bought two books that had something like: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Operation Somethingorother by Garry Nobody Needless to say, the books sucked.
Well, yes. Water isn't exactly good for the pages, I imagine. Plus you'll get mud everywhere which will be a real pain to clean up.
No, no, a few words is okay. It's just when there's too many words that it starts to suck. I mean, who needs all those words, right?!?
