Writing book reviews is one of the best activities you can do for taking your appreciation of literature to the next level. Book reviews drastically improve your ability to retain what you read, understand difficult themes, and share your love of a book with the world. If you’re not currently writing book reviews after reading books that move and improve you, you’re leaving at least 50% of a book’s value on the cutting room floor.
How do you write a book review though? The idea of writing a book review sounds tedious, if not downright heinous, to most people. Just the term ‘book review’ drums up bad memories of 8th grade English class where we were always convinced we didn’t really understand, or care about, the book we were reviewing.
But I believe book reviews can be a lot of fun. Especially if you get rid of your preconceived notions of what a book review should look like. Seeing as I’ve been increasing the amount of book reviews I write (and will continue to do so as one of my non-fiction writing goals), I thought I’d give you some advice on how to go about writing your own badass book reviews.
How To Write A Badass Book Review
Let’s get into this guide to writing a book review. I’ll give you my advice on how to prepare for writing a book review during the reading stage, then during the brainstorming stage, and then in the actual writing stage.
After that, you’ll be well equipped to write a book review – a badass book review too – and the rest is up to you. Put this advice into practice and then feel free to send me some book reviews you’ve written. I’d love to see what you manage to crank out!
Here’s how to write a book review…
Highlight liberally when reading
Writing a great book review takes work but the work isn’t in the actual writing process. The work is during the reading phase.
The most important thing you need to do is to highlight shit that sticks out to you.
If you’re reading on a Kindle, make use of the brilliant hold-and-swipe highlight function.
If you’re reading on analogue (translation: a physical book made of dead trees), get your pen or pencil and underline, circle, and write stuff in the margins.
This will feel odd if you’ve never read this way before. But, trust me, once you’ve read a few books this way, you’ll never go back to just passively consuming a book because you’ll see how much more joy and retention you get using this method.
But what do you highlight?
There is no right or wrong answer here. Highlight whatever the hell you like.
- See a pretty phrase? Highlight it.
- Something intrigues but confuses you? Highlight it.
- Notice the author keeps repeating a theme, symbol, word? Highlight it.
There doesn’t have to be a solid reason for highlighting. Just make sure you highlight if you feel like it. We’ll make sense of the highlights once you’ve finished reading the book.
Organise your highlights by theme after reading
Once you’ve finished reading the book, go through all of your highlights and start selecting your favourite quotes, phrases, and themes.
See if the highlights share any commonalities.
For example, when I finished reading Frankenstein (review here), I noticed that many of my highlights could be grouped together under the themes of ice and fire, playing god, and feeling like an outsider.
So I wrote out a list of these themes while I had my Kindle highlights page pulled up.
You can see I wrote a bullet-point list of brief ideas I had whilst reading Frankenstein, and then I went through and circled key words or phrases that I thought would be good ways to order my thoughts logically when it came to writing the book review.
If you can’t find a bunch of themes, you can also structure your book review by quotes.
I structured my Man’s Search for Meaning book review by quotes from the book that moved me the most. Then during the review, I simply introduced the quotes and riffed on them.
These quotes or themes will help you order your book review. See if there’s a logical way to order these (e.g. the theme of playing god in Frankenstein could lead naturally onto themes of the sublime in nature).
If there isn’t a logical order, just put them in any order. Choose an order that makes you excited or leads you to write easily and passionately.
We’re not in school here. There’s no rules. Just get your thoughts down on paper.
Less summary, more speculation
Your job as a book reviewer isn’t to provide a summary of the book.
That’s super boring. For you and the reader.
Anyone can summarise a book. The thing that makes your book review unique, however, is what YOU bring to it.
There’s only one You. You’re at a specific time in your life, on a journey that is uniquely yours, and so you will have insights and be able to draw parallels and connections that others reading the same book will not.
I love reading book reviews that show a piece of the reviewer’s personal spirit.
So ditch the summaries. Wikipedia does that shit better anyway. Start digging into the quotes and themes you chose and figure out what they mean to you.
Analyse, speculate, and draw life lessons from the book you’ve just read.
Talk to people about the book you’ve read
If you’re struggling to have any ideas about what you’ve just read, try talking to someone about the book.
You’ll probably find that the act of verbalising what you’ve read will lead to you speculating on different themes and giving your opinion on characters or elements of plot.
Talking about a book is a great way to unlock opinions you didn’t even know you had.
You’ll also find it easy to recall statements you verbalised when it comes to actually writing your book review.
Forget about how a book review “should” look
A book review doesn’t have to be academic.
In fact, I read a bunch of academic book reviews during my university days and they were complete snore-fests.
In my Frankenstein review, you can see the way I write is anything but academic. I use video clips from movies like Inception and The Greatest Showman to make my points. Stuff the teachers would tell me off for doing in my school book reviews.
I’ll swear in my reviews, make saucy jokes, and generally write as though me and a few friends were just shooting the shit.
Reading books is serious business but serious business can still be a lot of fun.
Just show up to the blank page with your personality and tear that book apart!
Forget about being “right”
Who cares about being “right”?
What does it even mean to be “right” anyway?
There’s a million ways to read into literature. Either a bunch of people find your thoughts valid or nobody does. Whatever happens, it doesn’t matter.
Even if a bunch of people think you’re wrong, there’s no shame in putting your opinions or half-formed thoughts down on paper.
If you’re wrong, you’re inviting a debate from other passionate knowledgeable book lovers. And that’s a good thing.
Shed the ego and just write about however you feel in response to the book.
Once you shed the ego and forget about being right or wrong, you can write swiftly and from a place of truth and consideration.
Book review organising questions
If you’re really struggling to write your book review, you can always use a set structure as a leaping off point.
Here are a few questions/statements that you can respond to in order to get your review rolling:
- The pacing was…
- The language was…
- Was it scary? How scary?
- Was it thrilling? How thrilling?
- Was it romantic? How romantic?
- The themes that stood out were . . .
- You will like this book if you like X and Y.
- My favourite character was X because Y.
- This book is like X meets Y with a dash of Z.
- My least favourite character was X because Y.
- I read this book in X hours/days/weeks because…
- If I had to sum this book up in 5 words it would be . . .
- If we plot the excitement of the story on a graph, it would look like this…
Subscribe to book review sites and newsletters
You can hone your book review writing craft by seeing how others do it.
If you’re interested, I send out a monthly book review newsletter giving a brief roundup of my favourite books I read that month.
Sign up to my newsletter and I’ll immediately give you my book reviews for seven of my favourite books of all time (plus a spoken word poetry playlist).
Now go write your badass book review
That’s exactly how I write my book reviews. Now I want to see some of yours.
Feel free to send me your book reviews!
If you want to read more of my book reviews, here are three I had fun with: