I was looking back through the archives of this blog as research for an article I am currently writing, when I came upon my 2014 review of The Bees by Laline Paull. Reading the review again, a few things hit me.
First, that book is still so vivid to me. I was shocked to see that I read it 2 years ago!
Second, after coming upon it a few days ago, I found myself with an opportunity to book talk it to a potential reader just yesterday. If I hadn't been reminded of it so recently, by seeing my own review, I never would have remembered the book at that exact moment.
Third, after the situation where I was hand selling The Bees because I came upon my review serendipitously, I went back and started looking through ALL of my What I'm Reading older posts. I was then shocked again by the number of books I had read AND reviewed yet barely have any memory of. Without those reviews these titles would have been lost to me forever, and that would have been a shame because there were some gems hiding in there.
Which led to this final thought-- I spent just a little bit of time documenting what I had read and some key appeal issues about those titles right after reading these books and now I have hundreds of titles saved in an easy to search database. I can pull the reviews up and use them to help connect a reader with their next great read. And it wasn't hard to do. I was simply conscientious about writing down something about the books I read, just like it says to do in Rule 4 of my 10 Rules of Basic RA Service.
Imagine what you could do with the compound interest of RA knowledge you could create all on your own if you started writing down a few key adjectives about what you have read. Look at me. I am living by example and even I cannot believe the wealth of information I have created all by myself.
And now, armed with these pre-made book talks, I can go conquer the world....or at least anyone looking for a good read.
And it doesn't have to be a blog. I tell all of the people I work with to put their reading history on Goodreads. Because Goodreads provides a summary of the book, you don't have to do a traditional book review, but instead can just write your reaction to the book. Becky's "three words" might be enough to trigger one's memories of that book, but you can certainly write more. I believe in having my goodreads account open in a window whenever I'm on the desk and I review it regularly either by year or by bookshelf category.
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