How Do You Review?

It has come to my attention that I am terrible about reviewing the books I read. I must only review about 10% of the books I read, which is really very few. If I reviewed more of them it might potentially help me have more posts for my blog and it might actually help me remember what I’ve read.

One of my reasons for not reviewing them is that I am lazy. Blogging is time consuming as it is, and I find writing reviews takes even more time as I contemplate a book and what I want to write about it. I’m not very skilled at writing my thoughts down coherently, I have to spend a lot of time contemplating what I want to say and reading things over otherwise I’m at risk of just typing out rambling sentences with no structure or coherence. I don’t think it is helped by the fact that I’m normally at work when I finish a book, or I’ve binge read it and finished in the middle of the night. Either way, there is no opportunity to write out some of my initial thoughts on a book as I am either sleeping or have to get back to work. This normally means that by the time I have chance to sit down and start writing a review I’ve begun another book and my initial need to write my thoughts out is gone, it leads to me forgetting some of the things I want to say and thus often a review does not get written even if I really loved the book.

When I do write reviews they tend to be for the books I either absolutely adored or invoked some other strong emotion from me that I need to write about. I also try and review books I’ve been talking about reading for ages and feel I should tell you what I thought, or books that I got a copy for from netgalley or what ever and it would be rude not to read and review. I think this is wrong though. There are plenty of books that I loved and enjoyed that I’ve not reviewed. I mention them in TTT posts and I mention how much I enjoyed them, but it turns out I have not in fact reviewed them for your reading pleasure, I want to try and change that. With series I would rather review a series as a whole, because it’s easier than writing bitty reviews whilst avoiding spoilers of the previous book, but for the numerous standalone books I read I would like to review more for you.

I don’t think it’s wrong I don’t review everything I read, because you don’t always have anything constructive, or even interesting, to say about a book. I don’t want to waste your time or mine on some books I read, but it would be nice to review more, it’s definitely something I should look into.

What about you guys, do you review everything you read, or are you a bit more selective? How do you decide which books you want to review and which you don’t? Is there are any hard and strong and fast rule you use for picking or is it more of a whim? And are there any books you choose not to review because you can’t say anything nice?