Reading flashback | August 2009

reading flashback post
I’ve been blogging for nearly 7 years now and I have written a lot of reviews. My reading tastes have changed slightly over the years, too, so I thought it’d be fun to go back through my archives and see what sort of books I was writing about half a decade ago.

(I didn’t start blogging until November 2008, so I’m skipping forward to the next year for this first post.)

In August 2009 I had been working at my university’s main library for a little over a year. Being in a library every day meant seeing DOZENS if not HUNDREDS of books I wanted to read, which meant I ended up dragging huge bags of (paper!) books home on the bus every week. I was also reading TONS of books each week and leaned towards things not related to anything I was doing in school. So, basically: lots of scifi/fantasy/mystery and mostly in the MG/YA age bracket.

Two of my favorite books that month were the first two in the Cat Royal historical mystery series. Which reminds me: I still need to read the rest of the series! Whoops.

Special shout-out to the weirdest book I’d read that month: Jeanette Winterson’s Tanglewreck, a surreal scifi story about two kids who go on scary science adventures.

This was the also first time I read some of Diana Wynne Jones’ short stories, and I was too lazy to review each story individually– something I would probably go ahead and do nowadays. Or at least I’d talk more in depth about my favorite stories in the collection.

Actually, a lot of my reviews back then were more vague than not, like this one about Time Switch by Matt Chamings. I think I was trying to avoid spoilers? Or I was just lazy. Or both! Now I try to at least pick specific things to talk about, like character personalities or something, though I do still struggle with knowing how much to talk about a book and how much to leave out in case it’s a “spoiler.” Especially with series books!

How much description do YOU like in reviews, by-the-by? I actually like having a lot of plot/character/tone/etc. description in reviews, especially if I’m interested in the book but not entirely sure if I should pick it up or not. Sometimes a specific detail about a character can be the tipping point. And I don’t mind spoilers, either.

What about you?

Maybe I’ll start going all-out with spoilers and talking about endings and stuff. The Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin (affiliate link) has a spoiler tag function that I’ve used in reviews beforebefore (it View Spoiler »), and I think it also has a blanket warning label I could stick at the top of a review if the whole thing is spoiler-y. It’s be nice not to have to sensor myself, especially since I tend to forget plot details after a while and having a more description review/reading experience log to look back on would be very handy.

Next week we’ll be looking at books I read in September 2009!

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