Two thousand reviews and counting

Sixteen years ago, I was sucked into an up-and-coming, then-independent website called Goodreads thanks to the recommendation of longtime friend Laura/Notepad (shout out). I haphazardly added and rated a few of the books I was reading at that time (Twilight, anyone?), then a couple of months in I made a fateful decision: I would review every book I read. That led to eventually building my own review website, Kara.Reviews, and by its reckoning, last week I published my 2000th book review.

Back in 2018, to mark the ten-year anniversary of my reviewing, I blogged about what I had learned from the experience. I don’t really want to rehash all of that ground. However, as I sit here, procrastinating on writing a couple of reviews, I wanted to revisit one sentiment in particular: how the amount of time I have spent on my review, and how my obsession with the quality of my literary criticism, has declined over time. In that 2018 post, I say,

I used to labour over my reviews much more. Now I still write them several days, if not a week, in advance—because I try to keep a buffer—but what you read is mostly first-draft writing. Sometimes, for a particularly important or particularly difficult book, I go back and edit or I plan out what I want to say ahead of time. Often, I’m structuring the review in my head as I read. Whatever the case, though, after I’ve finished that first draft, I don’t often go back and revise much of it—ain’t nobody got time for that these days, and no one is paying me for these words. So I just let it go.

All of this is still true; if anything, keeping my reviews buffered is more of a struggle these days. There was a span near the end of last school year where I considered for a moment stopping. I was feeling more stressed than at any point since the height of virtual teaching during the pandemic. My actual career obligations, plus podcasting every week, plus other adulting, plus reviewing every book I was reading, was wearing on me to the point where something would have to give—and my therapist was pretty clear on which parts he thought I should give up.

I’m the Problem, It’s Me

The problem, of course, is that I read faster than I can write reviews! I read for pleasure, to unwind. If I am not knitting, I am reading (and I was also in a knitting slump for early 2024, lol). To make matters worse, more emails soliciting reviews were landing in my inbox than ever before (humblebrag), and I was being too nice and saying “yes” to too many people (I feel so bad turning down an indie author!). The mounting stack of read-yet-unreviewed titles piled up. I made a Trello board to keep track of which titles I had read but needed to review, which ones I had completed and scheduled, which books I had received via NetGalley or publicist that I still needed to read by a certain date—it was a lot.

What do?

“Summer will solve everything,” I told myself. Even though I had agreed to do some summer school marking for those extra $$$, I was so looking forward to the change of pace brought on by not having to go into work every day. I had all these grand ambitions for house projects, for promoting my actual side hustle of my copyediting business, for relaxing. And for catching up on my reviews.

I want to stress that (aside from the marketing stuff), I have actually been rather successful in these goals. My house is looking good. I am finally, in late August, figuring out the relaxing thing. And I have largely caught up on my reviews and started building up a buffer that will hopefully serve me well as we start a new school year.

(This next sentence comes should be read as a whisper to myself.)

So why am I not loving it?

Why is there a part of me dreading sitting down and reviewing a book? Am I still burnt out? Am I worried about letting down all these authors and publicists when I honestly say, “Eh, this book was just OK?” Why, now that I have the time, am I not more enthusiastic about writing my reviews again? It isn’t for lack of good reading material—I have made some good choices this summer.

Should … should I still think about stopping? If you don’t love something anymore, there’s nothing wrong with letting it go.

This is the part where I get completely vulnerable and honest with you strangers on the internet. “I review every book I read” has become such a core part of my ego—and I am intentionally using the word even though I hate admitting I have one—that the prospect of giving it up feels like a self-inflicted wound. I bridled when my therapist suggested merely reviewing some of the books I read. Not even giving it up completely, just being more selective.

(I love it when my therapist has the unmitigated gall to make a perfectly reasonable suggestion, as if he has momentarily forgotten the whole reason people are in therapy is because we aren’t at a place yet to accept that kind of advice, lol.)

Whenever I seriously feel resistance to something my therapist says, of course, it’s a good indication I need to dig deeper and do some self-reflection (isn’t that the worst?). In this case, knowing I was approaching 2000 reviews, I meditated this summer about what I wanted Kara.Reviews to look like going forward.

There Are Two Wolves Inside of Me

Despite ostensibly having more time to write reviews this summer, the quality of my reviews has not (in my opinion) improved. For example, I really wanted to do a deep dive into Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein. By the time I had finished it, however, it was due back at the library with a hold on it, and I was about to take a road trip to Duluth, and I just … didn’t care to go deeper. Similarly, while I am proud of my review of A Memory Called Empire and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, I feel like I could have done so much better.

Perhaps this is just me being too self-critical. Maybe most people want shorter, snappier, more general reviews.

And therein lies the crux, I think, of this issue: who is my audience?

This whole project originated from a desire to journal my reading. I always tell people I write reviews for me, to help me remember what I thought of a book, because my memory is incredibly poor, and with the amount of books I read, I really couldn’t tell you what i thought of one from last year let alone ten years ago.

Yet, as with most long-running projects, mission creep is a bitch. People started to, you know, notice my reviews and like them and comment and subscribe (or whatever the equivalent is these days—I still haven’t got around to offering an email subscription to my review site, but there are RSS/Atom feeds if you want them!). I have an audience. It’s kinda nice that I’m on some publicists’ lists to email about upcoming titles. In this Era of Engagement, it feels good to be noticed, right?

So am I writing my reviews for me? Or for them—you—other readers?

Because “I review every book I read” started as a statement geared from a place of the former audience but has shifted to a badge of honour I display for the latter audience, and this, I think, is the source of my internal conflict.

I don’t want to stop reviewing every book I read. If I did, I wouldn’t have resisted the idea so thoroughly (I am usually pretty good at acknowledging when my therapist is right about something, even if it takes me a while to actually, you know, implement the advice). There are plenty of projects in my past that I have set aside or shutdown when they no longer work for me.

What I need to do, however, is re-ground myself in my purpose: reviewing for myself first, and others second. Truly. I am not beholden to an audience (despite what some people seem to think—looking at you, rando men who comment on my reviews on Goodreads explaining how I misinterpreted the point of the book or creeps who email me about how I am an immoral degenerate).

This project is a labour of love, and one I happen to share publicly because, hey, I’ve been writing personal stuff on the web for twenty years—why stop now? But I need to work harder on letting the ego part go and putting actual belief into the statement that the only person holding me accountable to these reviews is me. I know it might seem strange to say I’m letting my ego go in a blog post all about marking a milestone in the quantity of reviews on my site, but hey—baby steps!

I thought about what this recalibration should look like to an outsider’s perspective. Will I be more selective in which review inquiries I say yes to? I would like to say “yes,” but I’m not sure I will be so strong. I considered introducing a “lite review” category where some of the books I read get only a one- or two-paragraph review. Maybe at some point down the road. But the truth is, if you haven’t noticed already, I am a verbose girlie. It’s not length that is the issue, just the energy and thought I feel like putting into a review.

So to reconcile my inner wolves, my resolution is simply this: it’s OK to care less, to do less, to be worse at a creative hobby than you used to be.

I think more of us need to remember this. It’s certainly something I am applying to my knitting right now as well (again, that would be a different blog post). When you think about it, this should be obvious: it is unrealistic to expect our output from any creative hobby to be consistently on the rise throughout our entire lifetime. Sometimes we are just going to suck more.

To be clear, I’m not saying I think all my reviews these days suck. Most of them are still, you know, pretty damn good, all things considered (Taylor Swift hair flip dot GIF). Rather, I’m realizing that if the choice is between stopping my reviews entirely (or reviewing more selectively) and acknowledging that sometimes my reviews are going to be worse than I want them to be, I choose the latter. Someone else might make a different choice—again, there is nothing wrong with putting down a hobby, either for good or until you feel like picking it up again. But this is the choice that is right for me.

So that is what I have learned, after sixteen years and 2000 reviews. Here’s to the next 2000.