Tales from the Circle

Everyone is making their "best of" lists for the books they've read this year (I plan to do one too, hopefully soon) and planning their TBRs for 2023, but I wanted to take a few minutes to look back on three books I read a while ago that I still think about sometimes. When reviewing and rating a book I always try to be as balanced as I can be. My reviews are always written the day of finishing a book or the day after if I finish it late at night or get busy. If I leave it for longer I'll either forget to leave a review or it'll start feeling like this looming difficult task that I'm delaying. Anyway, this means that my reviews are usually my initial reactions to the reading experience. They tell you how I felt about it right after closing the book. I'm well aware that ratings have issues, and sometimes even for me it's hard to decide how many stars I want to give to a book, because I want to be fair, but at the same time I'm very aware that this wh...

  Rules and Myths about Reviews   You can find a lot of book reviews on the internet, but you know what you find even more of? Rules about reviews. Every other day there’s a twitter thread with hundreds of comments or a goodreads discussion with passionate arguments from reviewers, readers, and authors. The majority of these rules are based on very strange myths and assumptions so I wanted to take some time to work through my thoughts on them.   Authors Shouldn’t Read Reviews of their Own Books This “rule” is thrown around by both authors and reviewers. Sometimes it’s mentioned kind of jokingly: “Well, I went and read my reviews, but I really shouldn’t have done that” and sometimes it’s taken with such seriousness as if it’s some kind of serious and unbendable rule.   Personally, I don’t understand how this is even possible to acheive. I’m an author who spends a considerable amount of time on the internet and the number of reviews I actually have is very limit...