Reviewing books is something I try to keep in the habit of doing, because it keeps me sharp – typing, and thinking about how books work or don’t work. Recently I reviewed a book on GoodReads, and one of my friends told me that it was the most negative review they’ve seen me give. It got me thinking about reviews, reviewing, and being an unpublished writer.
Above all I want to be honest about how I feel about the books I read, good or bad. To be dishonest is to compromise my integrity, and even if no one finds out it would weigh on my conscious. On the other hand what if my review of a book I didn’t like came back to haunt me? It seems like a silly worry, but what if that one review ends up standing between me and a contract? A high profile anthology? A spot on a con panel? I suppose I could just not review books I didn’t like, but that feels like I’m ducking out of something and I do that enough as it is.
The answer I came up with was to be honest, but to make sure I keep it about the books and only about the books. To stick to what I feel, not what I think. Emotions are subjective – they have no absolute zero, and there is no right or wrong way to feel about something no matter what our society tell us. To make sure that the first question I always ask myself when I sit down to write a review is ‘did I enjoy it?’ (The next question being ‘what, exactly, did I enjoy the most?’) And if there was something that I felt didn’t work, to the point of distracting me from my enjoyment of the story, not to shy away from saying so. To stay mature and not make assumptions about the author. And even in the books I really didn’t enjoy at all, to try and find one thing that I liked enough to finish the book. (As a rule I generally don’t review books or movies I couldn’t finish.)
I don’t know how successful I am, but my hope is that if I give a book a bad review, and the author sees it, they at least won’t feel like I attacked them. Their book just simply wasn’t for me.