Good morning!
A while ago, I shared how my reading improved since book blogging – which is wonderful! I’ve also gotten to be more aware about things like reps & triggers that I never really considered before.. aswell as being opened to many other genres I didn’t even knew existed.
However; There are thoses things that kinda changed in the way I used to read and enjoy my books before I joined the community — and not necessarely for the better.
✦ Re-reading
I am a lover of re-reading my favorite books (more on that here!) and I feel like we don’t seem to be a lot on that camp.. because “all. the. shiny. new. books!!”. While I was consistly re-reading my same books over and over again- I can say that I’ve done it again for pleasure only once in my two years of blogging; without counting the two separate times where I had an arc review for the tome 2 or 3 of the serie and decided to reread the previous tome(s) to refresh my memory.
✦ Reading my Quebec’s French Books
I’ve been definately more in an english mood reading lately; absolutely failing my resolution of having an even count (11 English ones for only 2 French). While I do have maybe a bit less of French books on my un-read shelf compared to English.. but it just seems like what I own is NEVER the right book/type of stories that I wanna read. Even while browsing my local bookstore, I seem to find less French books that i’m interested in.. Which, I guess it does make sense- as I haven’t found “My Crew” within the community to talk about them with, and reviewing a book that’s not even available in english (so eliminating MOST of my viewers) is kinda pointless.
✦ The pressure of “having” to review
This one i’m starting to drive away from — some I only post on GR, others I do blog/Goodreads, and Others I just place on my “idk we’ll see later” 😅 But the feeling of wanting to compete and review (almost) every single books that you read is always there.. and then there’s sometimes the pressure of not even knowing what rating you’d even wanna rate them. Do we even have to talk about them all?
Is there things not necessarely positive that you changed/stopped doing since joining the book community?
Do you prefer it that way or you’d wanna go back to your roots?
I completely agree with all your points. It has been a struggle to be ok with not reviewing all the books that I read.
Right? While it’s different for arcs and review requests.. as we agreed to return the swing –books we’ve personally purchased or was gifted to us are under no obligation to review. We need
to keep that in mind, always 😅
I think i am the worst reviewer in history lol. Because i hardly review books nowadays instead i find myself recommending books ( and i do that like once a month). I started rereading again this year and to do that i found out that i had to block off the noise on twitter. Its been positive and a negative effect on me because i like to find new books to check out…and the problem also is there’s a lot of books to check out.
Yep.. we are constantly afloat of all the new books out there so that makes it harder — do I wanna « lose my time » rereading something I know I love, or take a chance on this new one I might not even like?
Kudos to you to he able to block off the twitter noise though! I shall work on that aswell..
But hey- recs are as good, if not better than actual reviews 😉 so that works!
I definitely feel the pressure to review everything, and then I end up just leaving reviews in my phone’s notes for forever because it’s a pain to cross-post everywhere. You should definitely re-read if you want to! I don’t do it often, but I definitely have for some of my absolute favorites.
I have this one book I feel like giving it a re-read for like a year xD as I do remember a small amount, but mostly forgotten all of it!
But yet… it’s not quite what i’m in the mood for either 🤔 I really need to shush the blogging world and just go for it!
I feel like that’s the ONE good thing of being a slow reader.. ahahaha less times a month we need to struggle with that pressure 😂🙈 (my maximum is four a month so far)
It’s so cool that you can re-read books. I love reading but apart from Dune I never could re-read a book.
Right, that’s true! I don’t always think about that one, it seems so odd to me that some are unable to ..😅