I spent my blogging time today writing a book “review” on Goodreads. You can see it in the sidebar, along with others I’ve written.

Why the quotation marks? Because I don’t think my comments on Goodreads, or most people’s “reviews” there or on Amazon, are really book reviews. Real reviews take effort to write. The reviewer should know something about the author and their other works, should systematically cover all aspects of the book they’re reviewing — characters, setting, plot, writing style — in context.

Who has time for that? Much easier to dash off a few impressions and descriptions of one’s emotional reaction to reading a book. And maybe that’s all a prospective reader needs. It may be that the literary book review is strictly the province of the literary world, not the realm of consumer fiction. After all, no one writes literary reviews of blenders, pantyhose or lawn mowers.

Call me old school, but it still feels funny to call those comments “reviews.”