On missed reviews: 01/25/16

In 2009 I started receiving ARCs and other review copies from publishers. To make room for my reading for fun, I ended up reading close to 500 books a year. At the highest I I read 623 in 2011. Even with publishing a book review or summery once a day, I max out with 365 (or 366 on a leap year) book reviews. Two posts a day is more than I care to do.

Now I'm down to reading around 300 books a year, or slightly less than a book a day. As I still have a storm surge of books and reviews from those years where I was reading nearly twice as much as I needed, I still maintain around a six month buffer of reviews written. Were I to stop reading or writing reviews today, I'd still be able to post new content until July 6, 2016.

With a buffer and with other things that come up, sometimes reviews get lost in the process. Take for instance, Legends of Zita the Space Girl by Ben Hatke. It's the second book in the three book graphic novel series and the first one I ever read. I read it as part of the 2012 CYBILS. I loved it but I wanted to read the first one to get some context for the story of mistaken identity.

I have in my notes that at some time I did in fact, write a review. But I've had two computer failures between then and now. It was a time when I could only afford freebies from my in-laws and there were reasons they had upgraded before giving them to me! So somewhere in the chaos of failing technology and massive amounts of reading, that review (and a couple others as far as I can tell) went missing.

There was a time when I would drop every thing and re-read the missing books so I could re-write the reviews. Then I'd push a scheduled review aside and post the missed review. Now though, I'm not as concerned about reviewing everything I read, even if it means not reviewing the second book in a trilogy.

Rather, I'm trying to provide reader's advisory across a variety of genres, written for a variety of ages. I'm trying to cover newly published books, older backlist books, books with diverse characters and stories, books that are thought provoking, books to inspire conversations.

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