What if…I stopped writing book reviews?

Choo choo. All aboard the critic-to-creator pipeline!

Hello!

This is not “My Favorite Books of 2023.” I still have fourteen days of reading, and I will be using every last one of them! This is a glimpse into my process/practice, so if that’s not your thing, I’ll see ya in a few days for a chat about the books I read versus the book I wrote!

In the spirit of end-of-year reflection, it felt apropos to take a quick journey into my ever-evolving feelings about reading and reviewing culture. I dug into the quantification of reading goals last year—specifically, why I stopped sharing my book count. This year, I’ve found myself accidentally sliding into an even harder pivot. It’s called growth, baby! 

I wish this were a tidier story. That I traded in writing book reviews in exchange for writing an actual book. But that is not how math works.

The jaunty little book reviews I wrote one to three times each week were rarely longer than 200 words. The draft I completed in 90 days is 94,576 words. If you average it all out, I wrote approximately 30-85 words per day about other people’s books. And I switched to about 1,100/day on a book of my own. So not quite a cute transfer of one habit’s word count into another’s. 

(Why I want this to be a clean trade is beyond me—probably some longing to understand my own brain as a machine that abides by the law of conservation of energy. Love when the capitalist call is coming from inside the house! 🤡)

Anyway, what actually happened was that a project—which had become a habit over six years—lost its appeal the second I tried to be both critic and creator within the same medium. It’s not that it was impossible, but the cognitive dissonance between sitting down and playing with my word Sims every day and then criticizing others’ objectively better work made me feel unglued. Delusion and audacity only take you so far, and I needed to scrounge every drop I could find to put into my own writing. Not put into a weird mental exercise that was akin to judging Olympic figure skating while being too unsteady to let go of the wall at some shitty local rink. 

Basically, I had to silence the outer critic to get the inner one to shut up, too. And it turns out it feels fucking great to live further in line with my values—to be a doer vs. a talker in another section of my creative practice. 

I don’t like that I’m presenting this as a dichotomy, some mutually exclusive situation where critics live on one side and creators live on another. It objectively isn’t like that. But the creative process is not an objective one. And for me to undertake this monster of a project, momentarily, the binary helped. Moderation has never been my strong suit. The same way in the past, I tried to drink just beer, or only on weekends, I tried here too—only non-fiction or not negatively reviewing the genre I’m writing in. It was exhausting. Sometimes, abstinence is easier than attempting to self-regulate. 

All of this isn’t to say that I stopped thinking critically about the 100+ books I’ve read this year (nearly half of which are romance because I am nothing if not predictably a bitch who does her homework). I’d argue I think even more critically now. Drafting a book has made me not only a better writer but a better reader. For the first time in my life, I’ve understood the impulse to take apart a complicated piece of machinery and peel apart the innards in hopes of grasping the intricacies that make it work so effortlessly.

But yet again, when I pull back all the neuroses and processes, I’m left with the perpetual desire for community. Reviewing books was never about reviewing books. (Who am I to have an opinion anyway?) It was instead a vehicle to talk to other people about books. And over the last few months, I’ve realized that I don’t need to leave behind a never-ending trail of public treatises to do literary gossip with my friends and internet acquaintances. 

Better for the karma, anyway. Because the quiet part I haven’t said out loud yet is that the second you try writing a book, you realize just how hard it is. I’m convinced it’s something you can grasp intellectually but not truly understand until you’re 56k words into a draft and realize you need to change the inciting incident. Not that it happened to me or anything (it did). The experience makes you want to give five stars to everyone: “Good job, honey! It’s a hard thing, and YOU DID IT!” 

Regardless of publication or other stamps of commercial success, I’m not sure it’s possible to write a book-length thing and not want the people you wrote it for (in my case—girlies who like Bravo, Bojack Horseman, and books that include kissing) to 1. read it, and 2. feel seen by it in a way that is at least moderately positive. The only way to convince myself that those outcomes had even the slightest chance of happening and making it to the last line of my epilogue was to turn into the kind of critic I hoped to one day be faced with. One who’s generous and more than a little silly, and most importantly, saves her snarkiest nonsense for the group chat.

This newsletter brought to you by:

• Downloading a massive CSV file in preparation for deleting my Goodreads account, which is long overdue. If you use Storygraph or similar, please tell me about it!

• The fandom internet space I’m in that includes a weekly book thread, which allows me to let some of my literary criticism brain rats out in a private forum.

• Food For Life Sesame Bread, which is cheaper at Trader Joe’s (check the date and store it in the freezer or the fridge at the very least).