Jay asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

How do you approach writing book reviews? I often have a lot to say about a book while I'm reading and reacting to it, but trouble finding the heart of how I felt about it in a short review. I enjoy reading your Goodreads reviews and those of Patrick Rothfuss a lot, and respect your taste. Any advice for those of us who read a lot, but could stand to recommend more?

Lois McMaster Bujold I consider my little reviews to be my personal informal reader responses, and don't set a particularly high bar for myself. I try to capture how I reacted and why without putting in too many spoilers, and offer something of what I see as the mode or mood of the book for others considering reading it, but really, they're on their own. The accumulation here on Goodreads acts as much as a reading diary for me as anything else, so I can look back and find, "What the heck was the title/author/what that book was about that I was reading last year...?"

It's interesting, looking back over a long enough baseline, to see which books were memorable, and which have settled into the sludge at the bottom of my memory and dissolved.

Ta, L.

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