Why You Should Write Book Reviews

Book reviews aren’t just a jumble of words on how a book made you feel but also a veritable document that you can quickly refer to when your memories temporarily fail you.

You may be a bibliophile, a devourer of letters and tomes. Or perhaps you only read a few books a year, a handful of pre-anticipated releases by favorite authors.

You’re happy to discuss the characters and the stories with your fellow book lovers, purring, sighing, and gasping at the books that met expectations while being equally compelled to drag the authors of disappointing books.

But over time, the memories slowly but surely fade. You forget precise plot sequences and the surnames of key characters. And, after a while, only a reread holds the key to reconstructing the pictures such that they’re once again vivid in your head. Any attempt to accurately recall exact book events becomes a dive into vagueness and the vestiges of memories long forgotten.

However, there’s a way out.

Surviving blueprints from the past, also known as book reviews, can be the foundation for piecing together the best memories of memorable reads, linking you to the past right down to the moment you read the first lines.

If you don’t regularly write book reviews (as I already suspect), here are a few reasons why you’re in the wrong.

Immortalize the Feeling

Reviewing books is a way to immortalize how you felt during and immediately after reading a book. Those feelings naturally fade over time, and with your all-time favorite reads, you want to feel the emotions all over again.

While it’s genuinely impossible to relive such moments, book reviews are a tool that captures the essence of all your thoughts and feelings about a book, seemingly preserving it in stone.

And, every time a book discussion or some situation reminds you of the book, you only need to read your book review to recall your original bias vividly.

Recollect Key Events

It can be frustrating when you can’t recall the names of certain characters, the order of scenes, and the details of key events in books, especially in the middle of a book discussion.

Book reviews aren’t just a jumble of words on how a book made you feel but also a veritable document that you can quickly refer to when your memories temporarily fail you.

While a quick Google search would perform the same function, you would agree that the best version of any written history is the one where you’re the historian giving account.

Promote and Support Your Favourite Author

Writing book reviews and publishing them on book blogs and social media is one of the main ways to help a book gain traction. Your favorite authors need your support and would love for you to tell them and the world what you thought of their books.

Even if you’re a black-hearted book pirate pillaging intellectual property across various online archives, writing book reviews can help assuage the guilt, knowing that you’re promoting the author in some way.

This applies to bad reviews, too! After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity!

Provide Critical Guidance to Subsequent Readers

Some would argue that book reviews are for readers, while others take the opposite stance. The truth is that book reviews are for both categories of consumers. While many book reviews often read almost fan-mail-like, explicit letters to authors, several reviews are written with the reading audience in mind.

Book reviews are a fantastic channel to inform other readers about what to expect from the story. A well-written, constructive, and analytical book review assesses themes, characters, plot threads, and other prose elements that other readers look out for when searching for new reads.

There’s an almost symbiotic cycle here, with reviewers and readers leaving references for subsequent reviewers and readers. This creates the foundation for a never-ending cycle of book recommendations that you can benefit from, even as yours benefits others.

Share Your Thoughts With Other Readers

Sometimes, there’s no one near, and you want to gush about your favorite character, debate key moral points in the story, scream at the absurdity of some unlikely plot twist, or figuratively rip a book to shreds.

In such instances, book reviews can be your only out, an avenue to almost immediately share your thoughts with members of your book club, bookish acquaintances, and the larger book community on online platforms like Goodreads, Discord, and Twitter.

Some books are like drama. They’re never complete until they’re acted out on stage or, in this case, talked about in physical and online circles.

Some books simply have to be talked about!

By writing book reviews, you create a basis for an unending discussion, and long after you’re gone (IF THE INTERNET IS NEVER WIPED OUT), random readers will stumble on your review and see the book through your eyes!

Conclusion

Whether or not you liked a book, it’s always a great thing to review it.

If done correctly, it can help the author better understand their audience and perhaps even provide tips for them to improve on in subsequent books.

On the other hand, you’re giving the book community an invaluable torch to light their way through the TBR murk.

So start doing the right thing! Start writing book reviews today!