The Trouble With Reviewing Books

[image description: A white woman in an oversized white shirt standing behind a tall stack of books. She’s holding a book open in front of her face, which makes her anonymous.]
Content warning: Mental health and brief mention of suicidal ideation

The trouble with reviewing books is that I’m tired.

This feeling is nothing new. It comes up every couple of months and I’ll tell myself I’m never going to review another book again, but I always get over the exhaustion and end up coming back.

It’s not the books’ fault or anyone’s fault. It’s just a thing that happens when a bunch of books with imminent publication dates show up at your house. Meanwhile, you’re still buying books from indie bookstores, picking up books out of little free libraries, reading assigned books for book club, reading books for personal and professional growth for your life and business, reading books for research for the book you’re writing…

Maybe it’s my lack of impulse control. I’m rarely inclined to spend money on things that aren’t life necessities and occasional goodies at the thrift store unless it’s books, in which case I (as much as a middle-class person can) make it rain on myself in books every 4-8 weeks. The result is that I acquire books far faster than I can read them.

This is due to a couple of reasons. The first and longest-running is that I grew up in semi-rural Alabama and didn’t have access to bookstores or libraries for most of my childhood. If I got books, they came from the thrift store or the limited selection at Walmart, if I was lucky. It wasn’t until the area where I lived seemed to become desirable real estate practically overnight and a Books-A-Million was built in the next town over when I was 16 (and had a car and job!) that I had regular access to a bookstore where I could pick out my own books and had the money to buy new ones.

So something in me solidified that being able to buy books made me feel wealthy. I still buy used books now and get books a-plenty from the thrift store, but that doesn’t replace the feeling of being able to walk into a massive bookstore, find a brand new thing you want that would be extremely unlikely to appear in the thrift store for another 2-3 years, and just buy it. It’s the kind of feeling you can get addicted to when you grew up without it.

I told myself that as long as I worked and made my own money, I’d buy all the books I wanted (within reason) because what was the point in being alive if all I was going to do was work a job I didn’t like (back then; I love my work now) and pay bills? I knew there had to be more to life and I was convinced that books were the answer.

Somewhere in there, buying books became tied to my mental health. I can’t slough off this mortal coil yet, I thought, I have so many books to read! Was that the healthiest coping mechanism? Perhaps not. But did it work? I’m still here and glad of it, so yeah. Buying books felt like an insurance policy against my own demise, whether of my own doing or fate’s. I mean, I can’t die in a fiery car crash with all those books at home, right? Surely whatever cosmic arc of the universe would recognize that I was trying to better myself and there was so much work to be done.

I was and remain so staunchly attached to this perhaps flawed line of logic that I’ve hinged my relationships on it. I told my husband when we were dating that commenting negatively on my book habit or implying that I shouldn’t get a book (as long as I’m paying my bills and not making poor financial decisions with long-lasting ramifications) was grounds for being dumped. To his credit, Mr. Off the Beaten Shelf took me seriously and in 8.5 years he’s never said a bad thing about my book habit and we have a house bursting at the seams with books.

I made sure my new boyfriend understood this too. (Yes, hello, hi, my husband and I are polyamorous and I have another partner. I love to be dropping a major life announcement in the middle of a paragraph about books! Anyway, my boyfriend, to the very limited extent that I’ll mention him, shall be known as Book Boyfriend.) We recently went to the grand opening of a bookshop in the neighborhood and he, who has limited shelf space, mentioned that he probably wouldn’t buy many books that day. But he followed that up with, “But if you did that [not buy books], you’d explode.” It’s true. I probably would.

The other reason my book acquisition habit has gotten worse in recent years is the pandemic. (Can we blame everything on the pandemic?) Over the years, the number of books I’ve read has either increased or stayed relatively the same; the number hasn’t gone down. In 2013 I read 36 books and that slowly trended upward until 2020 when I read 173 books. Even though that was only possible because of the pandemic shutting everything down and suddenly having all this time at home, I got it in my head that I’d built the habit to read ~175 books a year, so I could maintain that even as things slowly got back to normal.

That wasn’t how things went and in 2021, I read 125 books. Still a lot of books, but when you consider that it was 50 less than the year before, it sounds like a wide margin. This year I’m on track to barely read 100. Barely. And even though I know logically that there’s no shame in however many books someone reads and that I was also hustling my ass off to build my freelance business and writing a book of my own, it’s hard for me, an inveterate perfectionist, to look at my performance and not be at least a little disappointed.

So I convinced myself that if I just bought more books I was interested in, I’d be forced to make the time to read them. That combined with not wanting to go to the library during the pandemic meant that I was buying an absolute shit ton of books… and even though I no longer need to, the habit has been hard to give up. So the books keep piling up and I’m supposed to be Instagramming (bookstagramming) them and writing about them here and because some of the ones that show up at my house are review copies I’m supposed to read and review them ahead of their publication date to encourage preorders because that’s what’s best for sales and what most benefits the author and publisher.

And I can’t blame anyone but myself because I signed up for this. I literally agreed to do it by nature of having a book blog and a bookstagram account and intentionally connecting with authors, publishers, and literary publicists. There are just sometimes when I’m conscious of how much less I’m reading than in years previous and when I know I’m supposed to be reading a book to review but what I really want to read is one of the many I’ve bought, then it starts to feel like work. Then I just end up taking a CBD gummy and cuddling with my cats until I fall asleep and not reading at all.

Is this a ridiculous first-world problem? You bet. Does it change the fact that this is the whole I’ve dug myself into and I’m tired? Not one bit. I’m trying to teach myself that the world won’t end if I don’t acquire books at breakneck speed and that I won’t be ousted from bookish circles if I haven’t read every single new release or award winner or bestseller. I’m trying to remind myself that while uncommon, it’s possible for books to become breakout stars months or years after their initial release, so I’m trying not to pressure myself to read a book at breakneck speed and form coherent thoughts on it by a certain time. Reading should be fun, so reviewing should be fun too, and I need to get out of the habit of thinking that an indie book’s success falls solely on my shoulders.

This is also perhaps a long way of saying that I planned to have a review for you to read today but instead, you get this absurd, neurotic peek inside my brain. I hope you enjoyed it. Maybe I’ll have a proper review ready by next week. Or maybe I won’t. We’ll see. Right now, I’m going to therapy.