Oh, that title makes me think of some sort of bookish elephant graveyard! Rest assured, that’s not my intention; this post is to talk about all the books I don’t review. I read a lot of books (a lot, seriously, it’s like my superpower) and I don’t even begin to review half of them. A handful, really, and I thought it would be interesting to share a few of the reasons why the ones that Don’t Get Reviewed, um, don’t get reviewed. I am a horrible reader. Consider these my confessions!
- Really horrible front cover. I thought I could get past it. I couldn’t.
- You know that habit of making the first letter fancy and a different font in a paragraph? Like This? That.
- That thing where people don’t use speechmarks and instead use – or nothing. I can’t deal.
- A stain on one page. A mysterious, please GOD, don’t make me talk about it any more stain.
- Not being able to say much about it. “This book is good” doesn’t make a review.
- Being able to say too much about it. “This book is everything that’s wrong with the world” makes the review too much.
- Books represented by my agent or her agency. A conflict of interests and super weird for me to review them from a critical place.BUT. I will talk about them on Twitter because it is nice to talk about nice books.
- Oh my god, I stopped one recently because it had horrible feeling pages. Forgive me!
- Boring book. It took about 300 pages to get anywhere and by 301, I’d had enough. Other things to do, people to see.
- It dealt with an important issue BUT didn’t deal with it in a way that felt I could use it and talk about it. A difficult one, but any inkling of doubt is something that I take very seriously. Gatekeeper, I know, and that’s something I’ll talk about at a later date.
- It had an awful pun in.
- I couldn’t add anything to the critical discourse around it.
- Forced rhyme. The sort of rhyme that works with a very particular type of English and not, quite, with everything.
- Bad binding. Forgive me!
Next time : a list of the reasons I do review a book. It is a lot less embarrassing 🙂
Daisy May Johnson 
I love these! Absolutely with you on the cover thing. Some books just set themselves up for a glorious fall. I actually can’t review books if I think I’m going to be horrible about them. I’d rather just not bother and it’s no fun reviewing something where Charlotte has just come right out with “That is babyish and rubbish!”
The stain thing – yeah that would work on me.
I once couldn’t finish a book (or for that matter review it) because it stank. I mean really stank as in made my nose hurt it stank so much of a weird musty and musky smell that must’ve been part of the printing / book construction process, almost like the book binding glue was made out of whelk testicles or somesuch.
I think I would second you on the smelly book thing, yes ! 🙂
I struggle with this so much! But mostly I need to find more reasons not to review books, because even though I don’t try to review all the books I read, I’m still two months behind on the books I want to review. If I could try to review less, I might actually be able to keep up. Right?
Ha! Well, I’m not sure I can help with the whole keeping up issue. That’s a whole ‘nother post! 🙂
Very funny list! I can identify with quite a few of those. 🙂