Book Reviews

You may remember this blog post from summer last year

- http://brsbkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/so-what-about-those-reviews.html

when I pretty much gave up on reviews. You may not, the TL:DR version is that I pretty much gave up on reviews...

So - onto 2016:

I found that not writing reviews doesn't help me think critically about books, about writing and about the craft of writing. So I'm going to attempt to write reviews again.

But!

One of the reasons I stopped reviewing is that a review takes some brain time, even if it's short, and some writing time. And writing time, I thought, would be better applied to, well, my own writing.

And then my writing tailed off (i think mostly due to other writing like activities - editing, reading slush piles, interviews etc.) But maybe, just maybe, there is a correlation. I sometimes used to write reviews as a warming up exercise and I think that I've missed that.

Towards the end of the blog post above I said - "I would like to use the books I read to cogitate on matters and, as my thoughts are clarified when writing, my cogitations will make their way on to these pages."

I think what I need to do is find something that's cogitate-worthy (that's a word now, live with it) in most everything I read.

I also got overwhelmed by the number of ARCs I was getting & so my decision was to only do one a month - I'm also amending that. I'll review ARCs when they've grabbed my attention and are "good enough" (interesting, shiny etc) to bump another book - as that TBR is still growing (14 books for Xmas & Bday and an extra book that I bought specifically for holiday... )

If you want to follow my LT challenge this year it's over here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/204551 (but a lot of it is just repeating things I review here) & I'll definitely be sharing thoughts about the discoverability challenge...