My Bookstagram Era
I spent about a year reviewing books on Instagram, from June of 2023 to June of 2024. It was an experiment: I wanted to see if it was possible to do thoughtful criticism on the platform. And I am proud of how many of these reviews turned out!
I ultimately decided, however, that bookstagram is not really for me. The constraints of Meta’s platform are incredibly restrictive and frustrating and, as much as I like aesthetic images of books, I found that I was spending far too much time on the logistics of getting decent photos of the books I wrote about, at the expense of, well, actually writing.
Below, you can find an archive of the reviews I posted during that time, as well as posts from a Substack I set up to supplement it. (This is a work in progress; the archive is currently incomplete.)
14 Jul 2023
Review: The Twittering Machine (2020)
It is definitely worth a read now, as Twitter dies and alternatives proliferate.
8 Jul 2023
The book people just want a nice place
Threads won’t be it.
5 Jul 2023
Review: nod away, vol. 1 (2016)
The sheer scope is both daunting and exhilarating.
28 Jun 2023
The future is an unending summer
Will someone please let me out of this heat dome?
21 Jun 2023
AI wants to suck the life out of fan fiction
Maybe don’t let it.
15 Jun 2023
Poetic brevity in the time of bullshit generators
A mild polemic on writing.