For the next while, I am not going to write and post book reviews.
I have written at least a little bit about at least a subset of the books I’ve read, at some points just for my own eyes and at others for public consumption in different ways, for more than 25 years. For quite awhile now, that has meant posting reviews – sometimes brief, sometimes detailed – of every book I read to Goodreads and other social media platforms. And for close to two years, that has included putting them up on Instagram as well. All along, this has mostly been something I have done for my own benefit, aside from the occasional proper review published in a non-social-media venue. I started posting reviews to social media not out of any sense that too many other people would be interested, but because I figured that I would be writing about my reading for myself anyway and I enjoy lots of different kinds of bookish content created by others, so why not. Plus, I really appreciated when other people talked about my books on social media, so it has just felt like a good thing to do.
Lately, though, I have not been enjoying this practice. I don’t really know why, but it has felt like chore and obligation rather than a joyful or satisfying act of making. So in the context of a larger, ongoing reevaluation of my commitments, I am going to press pause on my practice of responding to books in writing. No idea how long this hiatus will last – I may be back at it next week, or it might be substantially longer. But I am confident that it is temporary, and that sooner or later I will be unable to resist my deep-seated impulse to write, in some form, about what I read.