Changing My Format for Book Reviews

Alternative Name for this Post: Desperately Trying to Get My Book Review Project Under Control

This has been a long time coming.  I've been in denial about this for years, but the time has finally come.

A brief history: When I first started my book review project back in 2006, my reviews on average tended to be very short.  (See my early reviews HERE).  This was mostly because I didn't have anything intelligent to say about the books, and also because I was trying to write the book review all in one sitting.

Over time, the book reviews got longer and longer.  The more I kept reviewing books, the more I started reading books with the eye of a book reviewer in mind.  "Oh, I'll have to remember to talk about that in my review!"  "Oh, I better make a note in the margins here so I don't forget to talk about that in my review!"

Plus, because I was embarrassed by the lack of intelligent commentary in my early reviews, I started to spend more time writing my reviews, and started spreading the composition out of several days.

And before long, it got to the point where I was writing monster reviews that took me several weeks to put together.

Or sometimes even years.  My review of The Case for Christ took me over a year to finish writing.  Granted that includes periods of procrastinating on it as much as it does periods of writing, but still. My review of The Lexical Approach also took me over a year (again, including the procrastination.)   

Part of the problem with writing massive reviews like that is it guaranteed that no one else would read them.  The irony is the harder I was working on writing these book reviews, the less they were being  read.  If I had simply just done less, but kept myself concise, maybe this blog would still have maintained some readers over the years!

Once I realized no one was reading, I started viewing these book reviews as for my own benefit.  I wanted to put down all my thoughts on paper just so that I would have a record of my own intellectual development as I read.  (It was horribly self-indulgent, but then all blogging is inherently self-indulgent.) 

I long ago got to a point where it would bother me if I had some thoughts on a book that I didn't write down--it felt like the book review was incomplete.  And so, more and more, I started giving into the temptation to just try to write everything down.

I used to have the same problem with my movie review project, but I got that under control in 2013 by imposing some strict word limits and time limits on myself.  I considered doing the same thing to my book review projects at the time, but decided against it.  As I wrote in 2013: 

            My book reviews can also get pretty long winded, and can also consume a fair amount of my time.  But for now I’m going to apply the capsule review system only to movies, and stay with the old lengthy reviews for books.

            I enjoy writing the book reviews more—I find it intellectually rewarding to put some energy into engaging what I read, but I’m not sure I can say the same thing for movies.

            Besides which, I’m such a slow reader that there’s never too much danger of getting overwhelmed by book review projects.  It usually takes me about 6 weeks or so to finish a book.  Movies, on the other hand, I’m capable of watching several in a day if I don’t restrain myself.

Now, the truth is that often when I was working on a lengthy book review, I delayed starting new books--preferring to re-read the old book while I was still writing up the book review.  (A number of the books I reviewed on this book review project I actually read cover to cover twice before finishing my review.)  So while I lament every year that I didn't finish as many books as I wanted to, the truth is the massive book reviews I write are a big reason for my slow progress on books.

For a long time I was happy to make that trade-off.  I figured I would rather read less books in exchange for engaging with those books thoroughly and writing up all my thoughts for posterity.  But now that I've officially hit middle-age, I'm beginning to realize that I probably have less reading years ahead of me than I do behind me, and it's time to get on with it if I want to actually read all those books on my TBR list.  (That's To Be Read list, for those of you who don't Booktube.)

Also, another thing that comes with middle-age is I officially no longer have time to myself anymore.  10 years ago I was single, no kids, and had a job that was a lot less demanding than my current job.  

Now, I have very little time to myself throughout the day.  

As I wrote in my reading wrap up from last year:

The last four reviews on this year's list ( Norse Mythology, Tales of Troy and Greece, Frozen (Heart of Dread #1) and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH ) were all reviews that I sacrificed some sleep in order to write, since I didn't have any time to myself until after the toddler went to bed. 

That was no joke by the way.  I really did sacrifice sleep time in order to write those reviews!

And it's not going to get better any time soon.  With our second baby on the way, I'm looking at several years of sleep deprivation.  

Okay, so all of that is the problem.  What's the solution?

I don't want to give up book reviewing entirely.  And I don't want to impose word limits on myself that are as drastic as what I imposed in my movie review rules.  But I do need to get this under control somehow.

So, I'm going to experiment with limiting my book review to sections.  And each section is going to have a limit of 500 words.  (Possibly 500 words is still too much.  We'll see.  I may have to re-evaluate this later.)

These sections will be optional (i.e. I don't have to write in every section), but I can't add new sections.  I have to stick to these.

Those are:

* Background Information

* My History With This Book

* Why I Read This Book 

* My Reading Journey

* The Reading Experience

* Summary of Contents

* Evaluation

* Stray Comments (aka Odds and Ends)

* Extended Quotation (to give a flavor for the style of the book)

* Connections to Other Books I've Read (or any other links to previous blog posts)

* Plans for Further Reading

* External Links (aka links to websites outside my own blog)

* Star Rating

The Star Rating, something I've avoided doing for years, I've decided to try out after reading Freddie DeBoer's thoughts on book reviewing:

Grades/Stars/1-10. My impression is that many people chafe at these, and I get it. They’re immensely reductive and suggest that they function on some sort of consistent scale which we can use to ordinally rank different things, which we can’t. And Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are indeed a plague on critical culture. That said, do you think it would be fun to give these kinds of scores in your reviews? Do you think your readers will enjoy it? If so, then go for it. If it’s low status, be low status. Who gives a shit? Have fun. If you aren’t having fun, why bother?

Yeah, okay, let's have some fun with it.  The Star Rating it is.

I'm also going to try to impose time deadlines on myself--write the book review within 24 hours of finishing the book.  If I still haven't finished everything I want to say after 24 hours, then that's too bad!

And one more thing.

As a recompense for limiting myself on the final review, I thought I'd start allowing myself to write down interesting quotations on this blog as I was reading.  This is inspired by Whisky Prajer's project: Prajer's Almanac.  I thought about calling this "Swagman's Almanac", or something like that, but I thought maybe the name might be confusing to people not familiar with Whisky's project.  (I don't think the common definition of "Almanac" is a book of quotations.  Or am I wrong?)  So I'm going to call it Commonplace Book.  This is a concept I heard about on Steve Donoghue's channel.   It's meant to be done in a notebook (Wikipedia HERE), but there's no rule against doing it in a digital format, right?  

(I actually have already made one entry in my Commonplace Book project already from 2 weeks ago, when I was already anticipating that I would make this change.)

I'm also going to use this a similar format to limit myself for my podcast reviews and my TV show reviews.  For movie reviews, I'll try to just continue sticking to my 2013 rules.