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 🙂