tl;dr: I've moved my book reviews to a blog because Goodreads is a questionable place. My book reviews are intended to be public recommendations wrapped in thinking out loud. They achieve this afaik. I apologize for posting on a blog in 2021.
My book reviews are public confessionals, where I confess (without my knowledge) that I missed the point. I've written around 90 reviews, some of which are short, with a comment on some random sticking point, but others are polemics. These polemics are often long, often extremely opinionated, and have only some sort of connection to the book. In fact, I basically never directly quote a book and I instead make vague hand-wavey motions at the table of contents that I've generated in my head.
The most important aspect of the book review is that it is made to be consumed: I post them on Goodreads, and then I post them on Facebook. It turns out this effort isn't completely in vain. On Goodreads, my older reviews regularly get 10-30 likes. This isn't much in the Internet age, but (1) it is Goodreads and (2) that's a sizable return on something I usually spend a few dozen minutes on. I've also gotten personal responses on a few reviews, so if the 90:10 lurker:commenter rule holds then other people may have found my reviews useful as well. In this lonely hell world we live in, a few molecules of serotonin from being seen are worth it.
I also genuinely want people to read books like The Righteous Mind and Caste. I genuinely don't want them to read things like Willpower Doesn't Work. It would actually diminish my opinion of a person if they read WDW if they did it after I told them not to. Writing a book review is a useful tool in helping me build convincing arguments for why people should read these books, and it also serves as a vehicle to transmit the ideas even if I cannot get them to pick the books up.
Those are the profane reasons for writing the book reviews: I want attention and I want people to read the things I read it. Yet, there is possibly a more sacred level: I want to think out loud in public. The act of reading is that weird atemporal psychic phenomena we've invented where you let another human being (or advanced AI) control your inner monologue. Writing is not exactly the opposite, for while you are producing something that will control somebody else's brain, you must first control your brain. Writing is thinking.
The 'out loud in public' part is where the Goodreads and the Facebooks and the Bloggers come in. By posting something publicly, it invites criticism, positive feedback, or even new connections. Each one of these is useful and probably sufficient. Would I write reviews if it just got positive feedback? Yes. Would I write reviews if the comments were well-intended criticism? I would write more.
I am well known for having "hot takes". My friends dread them, people unfollow me on Twitter for them, and, at work, my colleagues seem to have (hopefully) thrived on them. Yet, most of these takes are not so hot if I spent time sitting down and writing the logical sequence that it took me to get there. I simply blurt out ideas in an almost haphazard, meme-like way: "1. Here is an idea. 2. ???? 3. Profit." This is probably irresponsible.
My book reviews attempt to not be hot takes, and so people rarely disagree with them (at least, directly to me). Yet, I'd like to think they follow a similar pattern as the hot takes, except where I distill step 2 out into some followable thoughts. That is, not only do they get somebody to read a book, but they provide valuable thoughts about the book or about the world to the reader.
The problem is this: Goodreads is a questionable place to rely on posting my reviews on in the future, and to continue to get feedback there. As they shut down their API, it is unclear that I will be able to easily pull my information out of their database. This isn't great! The best answer I've found is to post my reviews, publically, on a blog. This has a few more benefits, like more formatting and making the links to Facebook less atrocious or being linkable from other places.
Posting on a blog feels passe. I collaborated on a poetry blog in high school and had a blog where I wrote about geopolitics and technology in college. It was literally sophomoric. Writing streams of consciousness and then pressing enter feels sophomoric! At least on Goodreads, the reviews had an air of 'fair comment section' effect but on a blog, they seem like they are from 2009!
I apologize for this and hope that where I link to my reviews doesn't cause any readers to ignore the books that they recommend (or to read any books that I think are trash). I'm sorry!
