How I choose books to review

When I started this blog, one of the first questions I faced was how to choose the books I review. Even more importantly, how was I choosing the books I would read? There are so many new books released every week, and so many good reviews of current books on store shelves, so how do you weed through the stacks to find the right book for you? To find my books, I use a few favorite tools:

Reading Challenges

There are so many great reading challenges out there – if you search on Pinterest, your feed will be full for weeks! My Pinterest feed is exactly where I found The Booklist Queen reading challenge. With one challenge prompt for each week of the year, it pushed me to read more last year than I have ever read! With challenges like “A Winter Read” and “By A Local Author”, the list pushed me to reach outside my usual authors and themes to discover new favorites. I was eager to get started for this year as well and started planning out my selections as soon as the list was posted!

Book Club Selections

This year, I decided to join a book club. Now, I am 100% THAT introvert, so meeting new people and actually talking to them didn’t sound too enticing. That’s the beauty of the internet – you can join book clubs and reading groups from the comfort and anonymity of your own home! I chose the Friends & Fiction book club and The Girlfriend Book Club – both can be found on Facebook and offer author interviews and book discussions on their pages. The F&F club has a monthly prompt to direct your reading, similar to the reading challenge above. The Girlfriend Book Club has a book selection each month for the members to read more like a traditional book club. The discussions and author interviews will connect back to that book each month. I’m in my first month with both and loving it!

Holiday Themed Reading

I noticed a lot of my book club friends read books related to the holidays we were celebrating. It appeared to get them more in the mood of to celebrate and I wanted that, too! I grabbed my planner and selected one or two holidays each month I wanted to use in my reading plan – I chose some government holidays along with some religious holidays from both Christian and other major religions. I’ll admit – it was hard to limit my choices to only 1 or 2 each month!

Organizing & Tracking

Now that I had my lists of prompts together, I had to figure out a way to organize and track them! I decided to go for my old standby – Excel and a planner. I listed out all the prompts in order with the holidays added in date order, then started selecting my books from my TBR stack, recommendations from friends and book professionals, and quick searches online to meet certain prompts. I quickly planned out the first two months in that file.

Since I wouldn’t have my laptop with me all the time, I decided to load my reading choices into my planner on the dates I was planning to read them. Our family uses the Family Wall app as a central electronic planner – it has a great calendar option and meal tracker, too! I took some time to add in all the books to the calendar in the order I was going to read them so I’d never be without my list!

Writing Reviews

These challenges and prompts take me through a multitude of genres, and I use both written (physical and e-books) and audiobooks. I’m shooting for 2 books each week for a total of 104 in 2023, so I question if I will have time to write reviews for all of them here. I will focus on reviewing my book club selections and will aim to review at least 4 other books each month.

I also recognize that it can be hard for me to get involved with audiobooks sometimes – I don’t know if it’s listening while doing other things, or if my brain just works better when reading, but sometimes I have trouble retaining what I’ve heard. I’ve decided to focus my written reviews on written books, but will include audiobooks where I can.

It can be hard to read negative reviews about yourself or your work online, as well. I have decided to focus on reviewing books I rate 3 stars or higher so we can stay focused on the positive. That doesn’t mean I won’t include lower ratings in my reviews from time to time – if an acclaimed book just isn’t my cup of tea, you’ll know about it. However, I’ll probably just post a quick commentary on the Instagram page instead of writing a full review.

Now that I’ve told you how I’m choosing the books you’ll see reviewed here, I am opening my inbox to you: What great books would you recommend I add to my TBR stacks? Drop me a note in the comments below!

What I’m reading