Confession: I am a serial re-reader.
I find comfort in books. Experiencing a story I know again is a childhood pastime (see my battered copies of The Chronicles of Narnia.) I could have read triple the amount of stories as I did, but instead, I went back to the ones I already read. Why? In the same way that I liked to order the same thing at a restaurant every time. If I know I like it, and what if I am disappointed with something else?
Furthermore, I am a fast reader. I sometimes miss things or don’t reflect on certain aspects of a story, especially when something big is happening and I want to know what it is. If anything, knowing the ending lets you notice the way the author built up the story. As someone who wants to write a book one day, trying to understand how an author creates a world is a huge reason I love reading in the first place.
So as you might imagine, with all this reading and re-reading, these stories become near to me. They are so intertwined with periods of my life. Like the countless times I read Same Difference by Siobhan Vivian when I was feeling like an outsider in middle school. Or when my teacher introduced me to my Madeline L'Engle phase. Or when I was feeling like a lonely only child before my brothers were born and clung to Little Women. Especially in the formative years of my childhood, I can see what I was figuring out about myself in the world in those books.
So, it is safe to say I am a bit biased towards them; they almost feel like mine in a way. It is hard to evaluate them in the form of an objective review. How could we ever quantify things we love like that?
Someone on the internet probably has. Definitely has.
And that is the blessing and the curse of the book review, isn’t it? There are no perfect books. But who we are and how we see the world can determine how we see them too. Sure, there is good and bad writing. But no matter how true the author was to tell the story they wanted to tell, there will be a review out there (or many) tearing that book to shreds.
Then, comes the balancing act of taking in other’s opinions and forming those of your own. There was this interesting article in the New York Times about people tanking the success of books through their reviews on Goodreads. That makes sense right, if it's not a good book, why not encourage others not to read it? But here is the catch: the people reviewing this book hadn’t read it. How could you know this for sure? The book hadn’t even come out yet. And who knows how many people on those sites rate books horribly without reading them, just what they know about the plot? There is no AR test you have to take to be able to post your thoughts. The idea of this website being strictly about reviewing books has never been interesting to me. Not only because of the above reasons but because books and the ones we connect to are so subjective.
So can there be a good review? (or in my case, how can I try to create a website devoted to the love of books that is not home to these types of reviews?) Enter, a source of inspiration: The Anthropocene Reviewed. The podcast and book by John Green are not just talking about the merits of something, like Dr. Pepper. Instead, they go into understanding the context, the history, and the impact the thing had on the world. And more interestingly, how John himself relates to them.
That is the most beautiful thing about a review. You can understand what the thing means to the person who is talking about it. Maybe it will carry a similar meaning to you, or maybe it won’t. You can agree or you won’t. No matter what, you will get an insight into the way another person’s brain works and sees the world. You get an insight into how they quantify meaning.
In “The Anthropocene Reviewed, Animated,” John Green talks about his time reviewing books in Booklist Magazine. Each review that he wrote had to be less than 175 words.
Every sentence had to work multiple jobs. Each review had to introduce a book while also analyzing it. Your compliments needed to live right alongside your concerns.
-John Green
In almost all pieces of art, we can find merits as well as things that the artist did to diminish the experience. I am not one for reviews that trash everything about a book. Instead, I want to strive for a balance of things that I enjoyed with wonderings about the greater context that this work sits in. How (in my humble opinion) the author could think about things they didn’t consider, or implications they had that were not intended.
Even those books I read over and over until the spines broke are not perfect. We all have our ideas about how books could have ended, or the way character arcs or romances could have gone (if we didn’t, fan fiction wouldn’t exist). But that brings me back to my original question. If our perceptions about books change over time, and the context has changed, what does that mean for those things?
I find myself fascinated by looking back at the books I loved and reread. With a different context, worldview, and even internal monologue, what would I think of those things now?
Let me bring you back to 2016, the first time I tried to do this whole website thing before. It was called… The Fictional Seedling. I spent lots of time coming up with article ideas, writing a handful, and designing a website. But, eventually, I didn’t believe in it going anywhere and I gave up. Blame bad mental health, or my belief that I could never finish anything (courtesy of a long history of hopping from hobby to hobby). Blame my loneliness and feelings of not being where I wanted to be in life. I had left college and moved back home, deciding I didn’t want to be a doctor after holding onto that dream since before I could remember.
But there I was, I knew I still loved reading, it was a constant in my life I could still hold on to. So I started writing these “book reviews in less than 300 words.” In the same way that John Green talked about, I wanted to challenge myself to a small word count. Just as in poetry or short stories, every word on the page counts. Every word on the page is meticulously chosen.
Looking back on those reviews is like watching that version of me write them. It makes me believe in this dream of a website again. It makes me remember where I was in my life, and what things brought me joy and comfort. For one small moment, I can glimpse that little girl reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader again for the tenth time.
I can look back at how I thought about those books with fondness, and also discover what they mean to me here and now.
Reading/Writing Challenge: Feel free to do one or more, and if you would like to write a reflection on your experience, you can submit them to us by clicking 'Submit an Article' above. We always love to have new contributing writers!
Reading Challenge: A Glimpse into the Past
How can we look at the books we loved and see our former selves or see the world for us at that time? Come up with a list of books you used to love as a child, then re-read as many as you can.
Reading Challenge: Not a Re-Reader? Try it!
Writing Challenge: A Test of Memory
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