Ever since I started publicly tracking what I read on Goodreads, I’ve mostly stuck to their five-star rating system for reviews. It’s easy! I finish a title, I hit the stars, I’m done. This is efficient but unsatisfying.
It’s not that any of my 65 followers on there are desperately craving for Nik’s next book review. It’s unsatisfying because it’s important to me to do a book justice. If I, as a writer, who has written actual books, can’t cobble together a few paragraphs to properly process, appreciate, and communicate someone else going through the same, momentous effort to create a book, then who can? Plus, it helps me pull my own thoughts together in a way that lets me remember the book for the long run.
Sometimes, I get lucky. A four-star book like The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business makes it easy enough to just type and hit send. But for five-star books and literary classics? Phew. I spent the last 30 minutes thinking about Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, and I still don’t know where to start. I’m not sure I’ll ever find a system that’ll allow me to review everything I read without eating up all of my own writing time. I’m trying, but when in doubt, I prefer defaulting to “stars only” than to put out half-assed reviews that make great books seem like anything less than they are.
This whole conundrum and many others like it are part of the “you’re an adult now” starter kit: You can never do justice to everything you touch, so all you’re left with is consciously deciding what you’ll neglect and where you’ll be uncompromisable. It’s okay, my friend. We’re all burdened by this tradeoff many times over. Ultimately, getting out of it with some sense of contentment comes down to little more than trying to choose well and adjusting as you go.
Do justice in the right places, and you won’t have anything to judge yourself for in the end.
