Why I Won't Be Posting Reviews Anymore

After thinking about this for a quite long time, I've come to the conclusion that I'm done with reviews. Obviously I didn't wake up one day and just decide "I'm not going to post reviews anymore", the thought popped into my head about a month ago and I've been mulling it over ever since then. The last time I actually reviewed anything was February last year, which is an incredibly long time to go without reviewing anything. Obviously, I have my reasons and that's what this post is about, so here are my excuses reasons.

I DON'T ENJOY WRITING REVIEWS

Yep, as plain and simple as that. I simply don't get any enjoyment out of writing reviews. Obviously I used to love throwing up a ton of feelings onto a web page and sharing it with other people, but that joy that I used to get from writing reviews completely withered away after reading and watching things that I felt indifferent towards back to back and just sitting starting at a blank screen for hours before writing the same thoughts every time. Maybe that review spark will come back some day and I'll start reviewing again, but for now I'd rather not touch them.

REVIEWS GET THE LEAST BLOG TRAFFIC

I'm not sure about everyone else who posts reviews, but for me, this has become the sad truth. Before I stopped briefly stopped blogging in 2013, my reviews had pretty high view counts, but when I came back they started to slide again. Even before the pagecounts began to slide, reviews would either get at least one or two comments, or none at all, even if I did make the comment rounds. I can't remember when, but I do remember there being a big discussion about book reviews, and whether people read them or not, which brings me onto my next point.

I DON'T READ REVIEWS

I personally don't read reviews myself because I would rather not know what other people think of something until I've experienced it for myself, if that makes any sense. Sometimes what another person says of something can affect what I think of something, so these days I've gotten into the habit of ignoring reviews and critics almost altogether, in favour of seeing it for myself. Another reason why I don't read reviews is for commenting reasons. These days, I'm trying my best to leave more meaningful comments, and when I'm commenting on a review of a book that I've never heard of and might not even interest me, I'm not going to be able to do that. My last reason is that I'm a firm believer in the rule of "post what you would want to read" and what I want to read now isn't reviews. I'd rather read discussion posts or lists or even rants at time, which is what I would much rather post.

NOT EVERYTHING IS WORTH REVIEWING

I've kind of touched on this in my first point, but not every single book or movie that I read/watch is worth writing a full review on. My attention tends to wander these days and not everything can make me feel something, whether it's negative or positive. In my opinion, I can't think of anything worse than writing a string of indifferent reviews every week because at least if I'm writing negative or positive reviews all the time, I have something to say. If I'm indifferent towards something, I just end up paraphrasing the words "it was ok" about twenty different ways in the same post.

I PREFER TO FOCUS ON OTHER CONTENT

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to stick to a very rigid format with reviews and I don't change it up very often. With something like discussion posts I have free rein of what I'm writing and how I write it, which suits me better because my posts do tend to get a wee bit rambly sometimes. And I do prefer to ramble as opposed to sticking to a rigid format, because I think it's more suited to my personality, and it's always important that personality shines through in a blog post (as many blog tip posts have told me time and time again).

I DON'T KEEP UP WITH NEW RELEASES

I'm not the best at keeping up with what is being released (which is why I never participated in Waiting on Wednesday) and I actually prefer to read books that were released a while ago because there are so many books on my to read list that I haven't gotten around to, and they can range from being released five years ago, to over a hundred years ago. My logic here is that by not churning out a book review that I think people would like to read, I'm giving myself more time to read books that I've wanted to read for a long time.

Do you regularly write reviews? If so, what do you enjoy about reviewing?