Yet Another Update to My Review Project

The Short Version: From this point forward, I'll be doing only video reviews (and not written reviews) for most of the stuff I review.

The Long Version:

Well, I really didn’t want to have to do this.  But in the past few months, it’s become apparent to me that I just don’t have time to write long reviews of everything that I read and watch in the same way that I used to.

Longtime readers of this blog will perhaps remember that this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to streamline my process.  In 2013, I tried to implement a word limit on my movie reviews.  And in 2021, I did the same with my book reviews.

But longtime readers of this blog may also have noticed that I haven’t been sticking to my own rules.  If you check out the past - couple movie reviews I’ve written, you’ll notice that I gave into the temptation to go back to long form.  And I’ve also stopped adhering to word count limits in my - recent - book - reviews.

I know.  I lack all self-discipline.  And yet, I don’t entirely blame myself for disregarding those word limits.  After all, this reviewing is supposed to be fun.  And what fun is it if you’re going to limit your word count?   And this reviewing project is also supposed to be about self-expression, and word limits also hinder self-expression.

Plus, as any student knows, sometimes worrying about strict word count restrictions makes it harder to write, rather than easier. You often spend more time trying to trim yourself down to the word count than you would if you had just written twice as much.

So while I don’t blame myself for slipping back into my lengthy reviews, I’m also finding that I don’t have time to write lengthy reviews of everything I read and watch either.

With two young kids, I have no freetime at home now.  If I’m home, I’m watching the kids.  (They don’t give me any breaks.)

So that just leaves work.

For years, I got a lot of my blogging done at work.  But I now have a lot more responsibilities at work, and I don’t have time at work either.

I suppose I always knew this day would come eventually.  Because of various lifestyle choices I’ve made (delaying marriage and kids, teaching in ESL), I’ve managed to avoid adult responsibilities and have an extended adolescence that lasted through my 20s and 30s.  This resulted in extra free time that I could devote to my blog.  But in the back of my mind, I always knew the day would come when I would have to become an adult, and I would have to cut back on my blogging.  And that day has come.

I suppose I should also explain that it takes me ages to write anything these days.  I would be embarrassed to tell you how long it takes me to write my average book review.  I spend hours and hours writing those things.  So when you’re looking at one of my longer book reviews, understand that’s not something I dashed out in a caffeine frenzy one afternoon.  That’s something that took me weeks to write. 

(I think that actually over the years I’ve been writing on this blog, I’ve gotten less efficient in my writing rather than more efficient.  In the early days, I used to go to an Internet Cafe, grab some free coffee, and just write for 40 minutes, and then hit publish.  But I can’t seem to do that anymore.  I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think once I started re-reading my old blog posts, I realized what absolute drivel I was spewing out.  And this caused me to get much more self-critical about my writing over the years, which has consequently made it harder to write.  Nowadays, virtually every sentence you see on this blog has been re-written at least once.  Whether or not all of this increased care has resulted in an increase in the quality of my writing compared to the early days of this blog… well, I honestly can’t say.  I’ll have to leave that for you, dear reader, to judge.)

Now, I suppose the sane response to all of this would be to just stop my reviewing.  But I just can’t bring myself to do that.  At this point, reviewing stuff on this blog is too much a part of my identity.

It’s pathetic, I know, but as an introvert, I’ve always tended to define myself by my interests.  (I suspect other introverts should be able to relate.)  Star Trek, Star Wars, D.C. Comics, H.G. Wells, Noam Chomsky, Roman history, Greek mythology, the Paris Commune, George Orwell, Disney… this is the stuff that makes me who I am.  (For better or for worse… Freddie deBoer recently wrote of the dangers of people who “are particularly at risk of obscuring the boundaries of the self, confusing what they like with what they are” .  Perhaps this is something I should reflect on more seriously… but that’s another subject for another day.

When I was younger, I imagined I might have some sort of career relating to my interests.  When I was a kid, I used to have this dream of being - an - author.  It’s a completely unrealistic dream to have, of course, but to be fair to myself it’s a completely normal unrealistic dream for a kids to have--in the same way kids dream of being movie stars, professional sports players, or president.  

Longtime readers of this blog will perhaps also remember that for years I was contemplating pursuing an academic - career - in - history.  This career path is also wildly unrealistic, although again, to be fair to myself, I think 25 years the problems with pursuing an academic career in the humanities weren’t as widely recognized as they are today.

At this point, I’ve come to accept that I won’t engage with any of these topics professionally.  But I still want to engage with them as a hobby.  It represents, at least in some form, an attempt to hang onto the ambitions and interests of my youth.

So I’m going to try to keep the reviews going on this blog, but in a much reduced form.  Namely, I’m going to be switching to mostly video reviews.

The past few years, I’ve worked out a system where the first time I reviewed a book on this blog, I give it a written review on this blog.  When I reread that same book, I do it only as a video review (example here).  

It occurred to me that I could save myself a lot of time if I just flipped my system.  The first time I reviewed a book on this blog, I would do it as a video review.  Then, if I happened to reread it later, I would do a written review.

Video reviews, at least the way that I do them, do not take me nearly as long as my written reviews.  I don’t script my video reviews, or edit them.  I just turn on the camera, ramble for a while, and then stop.  And the review is done.

It’s true I can be quite long winded--I can easily ramble for 30 to 60 minutes.   But 60 minutes is the limit. (Both because of technical limitations--the limited storage space on my phone--and because of physical limitations--I’ve exhausted myself after an hour.) So, compared to the 10 hours or so it takes me to write a written review, the video reviews are much more time efficient.

Of course, my video reviews aren’t very good.  That’s the trade-off here.

When I first started doing video reviews back in 2016, it was with an eye towards possibly transitioning from written reviews to video reviews.  As I wrote about at that time.  But when I realized how awful my video reviews were, I decided to keep them just as a supplement to the written reviews.  Because video reviews are, let’s face it, not exactly my forte.  

I’ve suffered from social awkwardness all of my life, and that same awkwardness manifests itself when I speak on the camera.  I’ve never been particularly orally fluent.  I mispronounce things.  I stumble over my words.  I’m prone to spoonerisms. I also have a tendency to just say the wrong word completely, and I don’t even realize it until someone points it out to me.  (This happens to me in personal conversation all the time, but it also unfortunately happens in my video reviews a lot.  Often I won’t realize I’ve said the wrong word at a key point until I’ve finished recording and am watching the video.)  

I often lose my train of thought half-way through a sentence.  I’ll get halfway through explaining something, and then realize that I left out a key point and I’ll have to go back and start over.  Or often I’ll get done filming a video, turn the camera off, and then realize I had forgotten to say half the stuff I had planned on saying.

Etc.  A lot of this, of course, could be ameliorated by doing some scripting or editing of my videos.  But then that would defeat the point of switching to videos as a way to save time.  So I’ll just be continuing with my usual rambling.

I occasionally get depressed when I compare my ambitions for video reviewing with the actual result.  I want to be articulate.  I want to discuss great art and literature in an intelligent way, and be part of the cultural conversation.  But instead I find myself just forming incoherent sentences and talking in circles.

If I was younger, I think I might have given up on the video reviews altogether.  That’s because when I was younger, I had this idea that if you weren’t good at something, you should give up on it and find the thing that you’re good at instead.  But now that I’m middle-aged, I’ve come to accept that I’m a man of very limited talents, and I’m never going to find the thing that I’m good at.  But you can’t give up on everything, so you might as well keep trying with something.  There’s nothing to do but to keep pressing on.  If I can’t produce great videos, then I’ll produce mediocre videos. The key point in life is to keep trying something, to keep trying to participate somehow, even if you’re never going to be one of the best. 

I do find that some days the words seem to come easier than other days.  I’ve never been able to figure out why.  Some days I turn on the camera, and I find I can say exactly what I want to say.  Some days I turn on the camera, and it’s an absolute trainwreck.

That was true even in the old days--in the old days when I was regularly getting plenty of sleep, in the days before kids.

Nowadays, I find I often am filming videos when I’m tired and sleep deprived. Or when I’m hungry.  And I definitely notice that it’s a lot harder to form coherent thoughts on camera when I’m tired and hungry, but unfortunately those times are often the only time I have to film videos.  So it is what it is.  I’ll continue to make videos in which I’m sleep deprived and struggling to form sentences, and they won’t be great, but at least it’ll be something--some sort of ability to interact with the things I’m interested in.

So, here is the system I’ll try to be following from here on out:

* The first time I review anything, it will be a video review only.  I’ll keep this consistent across all my review projects (books, comic books, movies, rewatching movies, podcasts, tv shows).

* The second time I review something on this blog, I’ll do a written review.

This system will drastically cut down on the amount of written reviews I write each year.  But at the same time, it will still allow me to still do some written reviews.  

Historically I haven’t done much rereading, but this is something I’ve been trying to get into more lately.  (You can blame the influence of booktube for this.  Since I’ve been on booktube, I’ve become more aware of the value of rereading books.  I’ve learned that you can’t just read a book once and claim to be done with it.  You have to read and reread it to really absorb it.)

Now, as with everything, we’ll have to see how this goes.  (Every year, I always think I’m going to read way more than I actually do).  But that’s the plan, at least.  Reread a lot more in the future, and do written reviews for all the books I reread, but not for the books I’m reading for the first time.

I’m hopeful this system will have some benefits.  For example, there are a number of books I’ve reviewed on this blog where my review was essentially saying “I don’t know what to make of this book.  I’m going to have to think about it more before I have an opinion” (e.g. Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Siddhartha, and, most recently, my review of Dune.)  Limiting my written reviews to books I’m rereading will hopefully help to increase the quality of my commentary.

Also, it should eliminate the temptation to write way too much about books that I’m never going to revisit.  For example my review of Frozen, an utterly forgettable book that means absolutely nothing to me, but a book on which I still wrote 4,500 words because once I felt like the book review would be incomplete unless I detailed every aspect of the book that was wrong.  Under this new system, It is extremely unlikely that I'd ever reread a book like Frozen, and so very unlikely that I'd ever need to put my thoughts in written form.  (Although no promises.  I do reserve the right to reread junk every now and again if the mood strikes me.)

Some more rules:

* I'm going to do my best to avoid the temptation to add in extras to those video reviews.  I'm going to try not to write about my history with the book (although I may talk about that in the videos) or put in links to previous reviews.  

With some exceptions: if the book is a reread, I'll allow myself a brief mention of when I previously read it.  I'll also include links to the Weekly Reading Vlogs.  

If I include links in the video description (for example, if I reference a link explicitly in the youtube video, and then link it in the youtube description), I'll duplicate those on the blog.

I think I'll also allow myself to keep the commonplace book going if I happen upon any short passages I want to share while I'm reading the book.  And then I'll link to the commonplace sections from the main review.

But no ratings for video only reviews.  I'll only do the ratings for written reviews.  (When I only do a video review, I don't think I'm thinking deeply enough to assign a rating.  I mean, the ratings are all silly anyway, but still.)

* I've largely moved away from doing audiobooks these days, but on the off-chance I ever get back into them, I think I should make a rule that books I do on audiobook only are not eligible for written reviews.  I'm often not processing them deeply enough to justify doing written reviews.  (A number of my worst reviews are books I did as audiobooks only: Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The Hunchback of Notre Dame , etc).  So, let's say that I can still listen to audibooks, if the mood strikes me, but they'll be video only reviews.   To justify a written review, I have to do both a first and second reading where I'm actually physically reading the book.

This rule will hold only for audiobooks where I actually have the option of physically reading the book.  For podcasts, which only exist solely as audio material, I'll still follow the normal procedure (i.e. first listening video review, second listening written review).

* In order to be eligible for a written review, at least 2 years have to have passed from the first video review.  If, on the off chance, I reread a book within 2 years of the first reading, that reread review will be another video review.  Although it's unlikely I'd reread a book within 2 years.  This is far more likely to be an issue with movies.  If, for example, I see a movie in theaters, and then 6 months later see it again on TV, that will still be another video review.  I won't do the written review until after 2 years from the first viewing.

* There is a lifetime limit of one written review.  So if I read a book once, it's a video review.  If I reread it after 2 years, it's a written review.  But if I then come back to it for a third time, it's  a video review.  And any subsequent readings will be also video reviews.

 If I reread any of the books I've already reviewed on this blog before this point, those will also be video reviews only.  I won't make myself write another written review for any of them.  Even though a lot of those reviews are pretty awful, we'll just have to let them stand.  (But this includes only books I've reviewed on this blog since I've started my book review project on January 21, 2006.  Books I'd written about on this blog before then (e.g. here, here or here), I'll count as first time reviews if I ever get around to rereading them.  Ditto for book reports I have on my other blog (e.g. here, here or here).

* I'm really going to do my best to review books as soon as I finish them.  I really want to stop my habit of allowing weeks or months to go by between finishing a book and reviewing.  I just want to finish it, review it, and move on to the next book.  (I know I said this last time I tried to reform my book review project, and didn't end up sticking to it, but I'm going to try my best this time.)  This will mean pushing forward on the video review even in cases when conditions are not ideal--when I'm tired, or not feeling talkative, or ill, or when the apartment is noisy, etc.

This could mean that there will be a drop in the quality of my reviews, but, as I mentioned above, my reviews were never really all that great anyway, so it won't be that big of a deal.

Also, if I do have a bad day when I film the review, and don't end up talking much sense, hopefully the Weekly Reading Vlogs will make up for this.   (As I said in my first Weekly Reading Vlog, one of the reasons for starting that project in the first place was to give myself more chances to talk about a book in case I had a bad day when I filmed the review.)

Addendums

* I was just rereading some of my old written reviews, and a lot of them are pretty terrible as well.  So I shouldn't give the impression that my written reviews are always better than my video reviews.  Some of my written reviews can also be terrible. 

Well, that's all the more reason not to kill myself trying to find the time to write long written reviews!  Yet another reason why it makes sense to switch to primarily video reviewing.

I do think that some of my written reviews are good.  Some of them I'm actually quite proud of.  Every now and  again my prose can be quite readable, I think.

I'm not sure what accounts for the inconsistency.  I mean, with bad video reviews, I can always just say I was having a bad day.  But the  written reviews are composed over a period of several days, so I can't just chalk it up to one bad day.  Who knows?  I guess sometimes the muse strikes, and sometimes it doesn't, and it's very difficult to find a rhyme or reason.