Current progress: 172 / 271

tl;dr: Stopped writing book reviews for a year, took me another year to catch up, the 230-ish reviews from that time are often incomplete (because most of my notes got lost) or short (because I wanted to catch back up).

I’m keeping up with reviews for 2024 so far, though!

It was in Februar 2022 that I stopped reviewing books, and I didn’t take it up again until March 2023, thirteen months later.¹ Lots of reasons: standards too high, syncing to Goodreads and Storygraph and private Discords and social media (if interesting) too draining, and just … why write reviews when you can read another book? Because I sure did not stop reading. Over time, I started forgetting details about the first books in the queue, which didn’t exactly make me happy to start the habit again, either.

In these 13 months, I read 175 books.

Yikes.

(And of course, it didn’t stop there; like debt, even when I started working on it, I accumulated more backlog. The final number of reviews I had to write while catching up was 227 and counting.)

At my first attempt at reviewing books again, in December 2022, it turned out that I had misunderstood how my ereader retained highlights (which I use to get myself to remember books in the future, and also grab good quotes or nonfiction summaries), and all my highlights were gone, and so my basis for reviewing. I was not happy.

I was so unhappy that I rewrote the software powering this entire site rather than touching the pile of waiting reviews.

In the end, for lack of a better idea, I decided to just add those books with minimal reviews, link this page in place of an apology and get on with life. If you followed one of those links, now you know why the review is so bare, why the metadata isn’t carefully maintained, and why those pages aren’t part of the overall book graph (yet, hopefully).

Sorry ‘bout that.

¹ In late 2022, I reviewed 20 books out of guilt, including some rather extensive summaries. It did not help.