I totally grok Tom’s point about reading reviews to get reminded about one’s reaction back at the time. I started doing that for movies on my web site when I realized that I didn’t remember all the ones I had already watched (and I do watch a fair number). So by now I have a record of the last 5 years, and it’s been interesting reading already for a few movies, especially when I watched one again and found that I changed my mind about it.

I got started writing book reviews on Amazon and I enjoyed doing it. I like being able to go back and read my reviews to remind myself what I thought of a book I read. Plus, writing all those reviews gave me the added bonus of becoming a Vine Voice on Amazon which means I get free stuff every month including lots of books. And I should add that most of my reviews are only 3 or 4 paragraphs.

I love reading the NY Times book review section every Sunday. What I like about the NY Times is that the reviews are all very long. They give you lots of information about the book. Since I can only read about 20 books every year, being able to read reviews of 20 books every week makes me feel like I am reading a lot more than I am. I subscribed to a book review magazine but I didn’t renew because the reviews were so short I didn’t feel like I got the flavor of the books.

The rest of life called a halt to that exercise for a while (I still have 1000 or so books still to enter) but I do like the way that LibraryThing uses everyone’s data to connect people and books together in useful ways.

You have reminded me that I should really also enter some of my reviews there too.