Happy Friday! I hope you’ve all had a great week. The weather has been good to me and I’ve got lots of the garden sorted and I’m off for a long hike tomorrow!

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @Book Nook Bits and Dini @DiniPandaReads. Each Friday, bloggers will write posts about a particular topic and share on their blog.

This week, we’re chatting book reviews.

Writing book reviews is a huge part of running a book blog. Do book reviews make up a big part of your blog content? Do you prefer to write long or short reviews?

Up until the start of this year, book reviews made up nearly 100% of my blog content. I hadn’t really joined the blogging community properly before then, and this blog was more of an extra holding space for reviews I was sharing elsewhere. Then 2025 rolled around and I decided I wanted to put more effort into this space and I started adding in other types of posts and joining in with some of the weekly meme topics that I was seeing other bloggers do.

Over the last few months, reviews have made up about 50% of my posts, but the frequency of them isn’t any less, since I just added more posts per week for everything else.

I would say my reviews are medium-length. I don’t think I will ever be one of those people who write entire essays about a book, purely because I don’t tend to read critically. I call myself a ‘vibes reader’ and honestly, I am pretty easy to please when it comes to books and I like it that way.

How does reviewing advance copies (ARCs) and working directly with authors and publishers change your approach to writing the reviews?

Put simply, it doesn’t. As I just said, I am a ‘vibes reader’. I read for fun, so I don’t examine a text that much as I am reading. My main criteria for reviewing any book is, ‘Did I have a good time while reading?’. If the answer is yes, and it usually is, then I’ll write a review for it.

My reviews are always written in the same way regardless of whether the book was bought by myself, an ARC or otherwise gifted. I feel like there are a lot of better reviewers out there who are able to offer a more critical look at what a book has to offer than me, so I leave them to that and let my reviews offer more of a vibe-check situation for others (like me) who just want to know if they’re likely to have a good time.

Do you post on platforms other than your blog (i.e. Goodreads, The Storygraph, social media) and do those reviews differ from what you share on your blog? 

I do! I share all my reviews on my Instagram either first, or at the same time as posting them here. I do copy my reviews over to Goodreads as I know it’s helpful to the authors to do that, but Storygraph is actually my preferred platform, and I share there too.

Regardless of where I am sharing, the review will always be the same. The slight exception is on Storygraph where the interface has extra metrics for you to add on, for example options to select the speed of pacing of the book, alongside the space for the written review.