A fun list on why I engage with reviews paired with an unnecessarily long history of how I’ve been engaging with them and how I define the word for myself.
A Stand-in For Conversations
A lot of the books I had decided to engage with in middle school and through most of high school were categorized as classics. This usually meant they were very long and full of words no longer in common use. It also meant no one else around me wanted to read it. So any and all thoughts I was having around these stories had to be bottled inside me (and then thank god I got introduced to the world of unrestricted internet access so I didn’t actually burst)
I mostly had strong thoughts and emotions after reading a couple (most) of these books and ranting for two hours to a friend kind enough to listen to me was just not doing it for me anymore.
I wanted to talk to more people. So I go online. I read multiple reviews. I start writing my own. I start writing reviews that were essentially just replies to other reviews. I think it had a lot less to do with structure and my thoughts and any sort of analysis at this point. My focus was mainly to get a chance to talk parasocially to others who had also watched/read the same thing as me.
Love Writing
But also, I loved writing. A fun anecdote about mariam and writing is that even before I knew how to spell and had just learnt my alphabets I would fill pages with what my guess of words and spellings were. I would write stories (pale imitations of things I had read because all writing starts with a healthy dose of unknown plagiarism). These were of course stories I could never read later because I instantly forgot what alphabets strung together meant what word. Nonetheless, I adored writing.
Writing reviews were an easier way to tap into that. I didn’t need a fully fleshed out plot, a fully formed idea. I could do one thing I loved (reading) and follow it with the other thing I loved (writing).
I did a lot of format copying; goodreads and yahoo answers.
But writing so many of these exposed me to the concept of being critical and the concept of analysis and ever since then I haven’t stopped breaking down everything in my life with these lens.
It also helped me understand what I look for and what I value in the stories I tend to consume. All the knot of feelings inside could be examined, prodded and slowly unraveled. I enjoyed the hell out of this process. Still do.
A Repository Of Feelings
For someone who was always so in my head but also had the strongest feelings attached to most of the things I was interacting with it got hard to keep track of why I loved or hated a particular movie.
I also would have bursts of positive feelings towards a book and would then proceed to forget everything about it except that it made me feel nice. I wanted not only to analyze my feelings but also to record them. I wanted to understand what the good feeling actually meant to me and then I wanted to write them down and record them so I could go back to them or use them as a reference when trying to explain to someone else why they should also consume that piece of art.
I often think about how I could have gone crazy like one of Dostoevsky’s protagonists if I were to stay in my head enough to let my thoughts get hold of so much of my ego. So writing it all down was an exercise of recording, archiving, expressing and in a very annoying way staying sane.
Which gets me to the point I’ve been dancing around, a review evolved from it’s definition of letting people know what I thought to a lot of other things for me. Maybe writing them is my way of obsessively taking pictures of everything in my life like some people do because they are so scared of losing a happy moment.
I never want to let go of my feelings until I’ve at least attempted to translate some essence of it, into words. That’s why reviews!