Editorial
What Makes a Good Book Review?
This weekend, my partner Tobie and I are at the Philippine International Comic Festival because he has a new graphic novel out - Diliman Generation Now Vol. 1. He has been working on this project for over 2 years now, and it’s really exciting that the first book in a series of three is finally out in the world as a physical thing that people can hold and own.
That said, I haven’t had the time to work on another board game article for the week, but I didn’t want to miss out on posting something just to keep the site active for all the usual SEO concerns. But rather than rush out a quickie post about a couple of board games, I figured that I might as well talk about other aspects of the blog.
When I revamped the Geeky Guide back in February, I discussed that I’d narrow the focus of this site from being about “nearly everything” to just board game reviews and book reviews. Board games were the initial focus, and over the past 5-ish months, I’ve written over 400 board game reviews and 19 articles, which isn’t too shabby. And I think I’m finally at a point where the board game side of things feels pretty robust and stable. So maybe it’s time to address the book review side of things.
At present, there are over 500 legacy book reviews on the site that are part of this Editorials section. It was important to me to retain that content and bring it into the new site in preparation for revisiting this side of things.
That said, I don’t want to go back to my old method for writing reviews since they were quite inconsistent and got rather tedious to write. This is one of the reasons I took a break from the Geeky Guide a few years ago, since it no longer felt like a fun side project. These days, I jot down quick notes for some books over on my Goodreads, and that’s about it. So there has to be a better way to approach things.
Similar to what I’ve done for my board game reviews, I know I need to develop a review framework that’s easier for me to work on, while still proving valuable to readers like you. At least with tabletop games, I was able to break things down into different aspects of such games, like how easy they are to teach or how difficult they are to get to the table from a logistics perspective. With books…I’m not quite sure where to begin.
The reading world at large tends to stick to number scoring for books, which is workable enough. My old Geeky Guide book reviews eventually started following a 5-point system that included half points for some titles. I still diligently rate everything I read on Goodreads, which maintains a 5-point system as well. But what else is there to rate when it comes to books? How does one break down what goes into the final score? That’s what I’m puzzling over.
If any of you have recommendations or ideas for how I should tackle this, I’m all ears. I know I haven’t figured out how to add some sort of comments module for this site so far, but if you’ve found this site through one of my social shares, then feel free to chime in there. Or use those socials to get in touch with me directly - this all just stresses that the Geeky Guide remains a work in progress so far.
But I’d really love to hear from any of you who have been following the site since the revamp this year - or even better, if you’ve been reading the guide since before the pandemic, when the site was last active.
So what makes a good book review?
