I haven’t liked all of Ishiguro’s books, but he writes beautiful and original prose. I just wonder if the majority of readers are educated to recognize it anymore. I like mystery novels and popular fiction as much as anyone, but The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go will live on after people forgot about One of Us Is Lying.
If you are looking for professional book reviews, I would probably say Publisher’s Weekly. But the problem with the “big” reviewers is that they give priority to “big house” publications whose publicists can get the books in front of their reviewers. If you are a fan of a writer who is not a “big time” author, or of a category that doesn’t usually get covered in that kid of review (stuff like romance, mystery, horror) you would probably get a better sense of the book to read the reviews on sites like Goodreads, Library Thing or blogs dedicated to that category.
The fastest I have read a book was a couple hours. With a series, it’s different because if I liked the first book, and it takes a year or more for the next book in the series to come out, then I’m not sure what the total would be, but there are series I liked (mostly mystery, suspense) where I read each book in under a day.
Books are like any other product - when a product is sold, the people who make the product make money. Since libraries buy books, sometimes multiple copies of a book if they run book clubs, an author does make royalties on the sale of those books. And I don’t have a problem with borrowing from libraries because authors know what they deal is - tho if I really like a book I took out of the library, I post a nice review because maybe someone will be influenced by positive reviews to buy the book.
The latest Jack Reacher book - lately they are too long, too much filler and not enough suspense
A Frieda McFadden book, One By One - a category I like (suspense, psychological thriller) and she was recommended by a few people but I found the writing pretty mediocre, the characters not interesting.
The Daughter of Time - there’s always a popular writer that some people seem to love, and one of their books people always point to and for a lot of them its Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, but I just found this tedious.
I don’t see characters unless the book came with really good illustrations. But having said that, I can’t go back to the Sherlock Holmes stories - I’m a big Holmes fan - and not see and hear Jeremy Brett, the actor who played Holmes in the 80s-90s series.
I think Tarantino had a novelization done of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood but I don’t think he wrote it.