A Budding Obsession With Book Reviews

A Literary Fellow Meditating by Eugene Delacroix, French, 1821. Public Domain via Met Museum Open Access

I’ve made a mortifying discovery about myself. For years, I’ve trumpeted my desire to “read more and write better” with the zealous certainty of the perpetually ambitious. I’ve plastered it across social media profiles, brandished it at dinner parties, let it haunt my midnight thoughts—the kind of vague, grandiose ambition that sounds impressive but means nothing, like promising to “find yourself” while you eat, pray, and love.

The reckoning arrived with a simple question: Was I, in fact, a “good” reader?

The answer dropped like glass on the floor, crystal clear and crushing: No, I was not.

This wasn’t the usual contemporary affliction, that social media-induced attention span we all blame our scattered thoughts on. My literary malady ran deeper. The diagnosis revealed itself through a deceptively simple test: Could I write a review? This exercise, I discovered, is where reading and writing perform their intricate dance, each step revealing how hopelessly entangled these skills remain.

Consider my three-year struggle with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Three times I’ve picked it up, three times I’ve abandoned ship halfway through. The prose is crystalline, the premise holds immense potential. Yet something in its mundanity and mechanized restraint always stops me from diving fully in. Reading it feels like swimming in slow motion, beautiful but somehow impossible to finish.

Then I read James Wood’s review of it in The New Yorker, and suddenly, I was looking at an entirely different book. His critique wasn’t conventional “judgment; he loaded each paragraph with so much insight that it was hard to believe a mere 19 paragraphs could contain so much. Apart from making me eager to attempt the book again, Wood’s review deepened my appreciation for its construction. He traced patterns from Tolstoyan defamiliarization to Kafkaesque fantasy, from the brief Martian poetry craze of the 1980s to the broader themes of exile and immigration in modern literature. Through his lens, the novel’s DNA became visible.

Wood made me realize that I had, in fact, felt this Ishiguroan undercurrent before—when I read Never Let Me Go. “And we, in turn, are first lulled, then provoked, and then estranged by this sedated equilibrium,” Wood writes. He demonstrates how Ishiguro creates a deceptively ordinary voice that slowly reveals itself as something uncanny, something alien. Only halfway through his review does Wood introduce the protagonist, Klara. I paid close attention to how much detail he gave—just enough to establish the premise, but not a retelling. Instead, he prompts the reader to ask the biggest questions: “What sense can an artificial intelligence make of death? For that matter, what sense can human intelligence make of death?” And then, the masterpiece of an ending, circling back to his opening with a meditation on whether our postcards to the world, our words, our books—are ever truly read.

Wood never explicitly says “read this!” or “don’t!”, I actually had to Google whether it was a positive or rave review (it was, in fact a “rave”)! But he succeeded in getting me to attempt the book again—with a far greater appreciation for the craft at work and an accompanying set of questions to guide me through it.

That’s the thing about [great] critics, they aren’t just critics, they’re architects of understanding. Wood, an author himself, reads so widely and obsessively that he can trace techniques across literary history. That may explain why so many of our greatest writers were also prolific reviewers. Virginia Woolf published a great many reviews while developing her craft, each one a double helix of reading and writing, intertwined. Isn’t that what the best reviewers do — decode a book’s DNA and lay its structure bare? The practice stretches back centuries, to when the Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions began publishing what we’d now call peer reviews. They understood something I’m only now grasping: to write is to read deeply, and to read deeply is to write.

Essay Excerpt from Woolf Online Digital Archive

Not since grade school had I formally critiqued a work. University trained me to strip-mine texts for evidence, to buttress predetermined theses with carefully selected quotes. But I had never learned to appreciate a book as its own universe, to dissect its mechanics while honoring its magic.

This realization has sharpened my ambitions into something tangible. Active reading isn’t about highlighting passages in neon or littering the margins with exclamation points. It’s about registering those quiet shocks of recognition, those ripples of pleasure or discomfort that a phrase sends through you. It’s about admitting when a paragraph makes you wince, or smile, or want to call your mother—and then asking yourself why.

Now I find myself tumbling down the rabbit hole of criticism itself. What makes a good review? At least this time, I know exactly what I’m failing at. So, I keep reading, keep writing, because the more I engage, the less I’m sure of. And isn’t that the real test?