Now that I’ve written a few reviews (9!), I’m starting to get a better understanding of what I want out of this blog. I realized that my “reviews” aren’t really standard reviews as there’s not much evaluation or recommendation happening in them. One of the things I’d like to get out of this blog is a better understanding of what I like and dislike and, optimistically, a community of people who also like books that can recommend books or other art to me on the basis of things that I’ve observed enjoying about what I’ve read so far. One of the things I’m cautious of doing, though, is being critical or evaluative in a “this is good and this is bad” way, partially because art is very subjective but primarily because judging art in that way creates a habit of judgement in my mind that automatically applies itself to anything I try to create and preemptively judging myself is counterproductive to creating at all. To balance this desire and caution, I’m reworking how I’m approaching reviews.

So, posts from here out will have a slightly different format. In addition to starting with a spoiler-free Description section, there will also be a spoiler-free Recommendation section, usually with “read if” and “skip if” subsections. I’m also going to rename the Review section as the Discussion section because I’m less interested in describing what I perceive to be the artistic merits of a book and more interested in describing how I relate to a book and which parts of it stuck with me the most.

As always, thanks for reading!