If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

I’ve alluded enough times to my soft policy of what I do and don’t write about here that I feel it’s worth writing up in a post of its own to link to. 

I don’t write about every book that I read. This is for a couple of reasons: 

1. This isn’t a review blog! I am not chronicling the entirety of my reading life. I don’t have time for that, but mostly, I don’t want to put the pressure on myself to feel like I have to come up with public-facing thoughts about everything.

2. I don’t like everything I read, and I don’t want to build a habit of saying negative things about living authors in public. 

The first reason is fairly self explanatory, but what about the second? I have access to my stats, I know that absolutely nobody is reading this website. I have no audience and maybe never will! It’s not something I expect (who even reads blogs in 2026!?) and I’m not trying to market myself or publicize this space. I have even questioned myself severely about why I chose to write a public blog instead of continuing to keep a private journal and the answer is convenience as much as anything:  notebooks are heavy and get full up and it can be hard to find a thought again for reference. I want to be able to search and index my thoughts. A private google doc or private blog could work, but I want to be able to pull up my thoughts to reference on any device, anywhere, without having to sign in. For this purpose, a blog just makes sense.

So, these are public thoughts, and I do feel a responsibility to be professional and reasonably kind about the hard work of living people. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” isn’t a rule I necessarily live my life by, but also, why not err in that direction? I’m anonymous, but I am a professional in a book-adjacent field and as a professional, I simply wouldn’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say at a conference or event.

Sometimes I’ll start writing a post and come back to my draft and feel like my words are mean. One lesson I’ve learned about the internet is that it is a small place and for all that it’s full of bots, it also has real people. Almost no living author is so big or so inhuman that they may not be googling for reviews and reactions to their work. I don’t want to be in a position of making anyone feel bad for trying to make art and entertainment. The stakes are low for me, but emotionally high for others. So what if I hated a book and didn’t finish it? Who cares? Beyond absolute record keeping (which I can do more privately), I’m not even sure I do. If a theme or trend in contemporary publishing really bothers me, I think I should be able to write about them without relying on specific examples.

This doesn’t mean I won’t ever voice a critique about a book, but if I am writing publicly about a book by a living author, it means that even if I have critiques, I overall liked it! No holds barred for the dead, though, nor for works that are objectionable to me in ways that go beyond taste and preference.