Writing Reviews is Hard
Last week I posted review number 19 of 2010. Last night I finished book number 27. There’s a small gap, and the main problem is that writing reviews is hard.
I enjoy the process of thinking through the book, discussing it with others who have and haven’t read it, and developing my own arguments around the issues discussed. But writing them down and editing them for posting is time consuming. It’s become worse as the number of finished but unreviewed books increases; it becomes more intimidating with each one to try to close the gap, and harder to remember what was in the book when I try.
So I’ve decided not to try. I’m no longer going to try to write an in-depth review of everything I read, only those that spark me sufficiently to do so. I’ll post short comments for those that I choose not to engage for a full review. Coming up: short reviews of The Shallows (longer commentary can be found at Christ and Pop Culture), The Last Colony, and The Andromeda Strain. I’ll post full comments about Technopoly, and Endangered Minds. I haven’t decided about Codex yet, and my comments on The Grace Awakening and He That Is Spiritual will be combined.
You’re not kidding. For a while, I was trying to review everything I read. That obviously didn’t happen. In fact, I think that this year, I’ve only reviewed nine books (compared to thirty-six last year). It’s time and thought consuming and as books become distant, they become abolished to the haze of memory. There are books I read earlier this year that I’d love to review (like Victor Lavalle’s Big Machine and Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) that I cannot possibly treat with justice now that more than six month’s have past. It’s really kind of heartbreaking.