The Stray Reader

I became a book reviewer for a book group and I’ve posted three reviews for that group since. There’s no strict format to follow, but it was still an enlightening experience as I realized I had to modify the way I write my reviews, especially for the ones I dislike. I’ve been posting reviews based on all the things I thought and felt about the book with no specific format or audience in mind. I started this blog because I just wanted an archive and thought it might be fun. And it has been fun! But since then I learned that just posting what I was thinking and feeling wasn’t enough. For reviews, I learned that I needed to include a brief description of the book, exclude spoilers, include reasons on why or why not would I recommend it to readers, and so much more.

I also became a lot more careful with my words because the authors directly sent me their books for this group’s reviews. I’m required to let them know about my thoughts. Before then, I would never expect any of my words to weigh anything on an author’s work or reputation. They had thousands of reviews and are already well-established. However, in this group, the indie authors are participating and giving their work for free because they’re exerting so much effort to get their work known. I truly admire the hustle and I don’t want to hurt their feelings. A couple of the books I reviewed had so few reviews on Goodreads that posting my low-star review made me feel awful. Once I read it, a review was required. That was the exchange. I couldn’t be dishonest but, again, I also didn’t want to hurt the authors’ feelings. It has been a difficult moral dilemma.

These recent developments made writing reviews less fun for me, however. I still like writing my thoughts down, I still want to keep an archive through this blog, and I still want to keep reviewing books. But cherry-picking my words made me feel a little dishonest and now it takes a lot more mental bandwidth to write reviews. Now, I’m just trying to figure out how to compromise. I want to be better at writing but I also still want to feel the same level of enjoyment I have writing these book thoughts (I’m even hesitating to call them reviews now 😅).

I’m feeling the need to revise the contents I post moving forward. I thought about creating two posts per book: one less-formal review for my enjoyment and one formal review with the elements of a proper review to post on other websites. So now I’m going down the rabbit hole of what counts as a book review, a book analysis, and a book report. The difficulty I’m having is that writing in one form eliminates some of the elements I want to incorporate in my posts. A book review is the closest thing, but not including spoilers will remove the section where I desire to analyze characters, writing style, and the scenes I loved. It felt wrong and not true to the core of why I’m writing. I’ll keep trying to figure this out so for now I’m holding off on posting regularly. I’m going to experiment for a while!