How long is too long when reviewing a book?

Okay so something I didn’t anticipate when I started my blog was how long it sometimes takes me write a review after I have finished a book. I try to write the review as soon as I can but, if I’m busy or if life decides this would be a great time to just really get in the way generally I’ll wait and write it when I can. The problem with this is that I am still reading books at roughly the same rate which has led to a bit of a backlog when it comes to the reviews. Now this isn’t exactly too much of a problem in itself, but if it’s been awhile and I go to review a book (especially if I’ve read things in between) I have a tendency to forget everything I initially wanted to put in the review, I’ve lost the feeling and the memories of exactly how I felt once I finished and generally just remember the important facts.

The first challenge I had with this is that when I first started writing my reviews and set myself the challenge of 100 book reviews for 2017 it was already April, April 3rd to be precise. Naively I thought, no sweat, I will just go back and write reviews for all the books I read in the first three months of the year. Easy. Apparently not, although they were relatively fresh in my memory, one I had very little motivation to go back through and list all the books I had already read and then set about writing reviews (I was far more interested in just reading new books) and two when I did try it all sounded very basic, I hadn’t considered writing a review when I was reading these books and the reviews reflected this so I scrapped that and moved on.

The next issue I didn’t foresee is that I didn’t always want to post a review of a book I had read. This has been for a variety of reasons and funnily enough not because I didn’t like a book (I am still working on my blog post for books I DNF but that’s another discussion) but either because it was a sequel of a book and I didn’t feel the need to write another review for the sequel so soon after posting the first, or everyone was posting reviews of the book at the same time, e.g. ACOWAR. When I do have a backlog I will also focus on getting up reviews from review requests or NetGalley and others tend to get left behind to the point I consider of no return. My point is that at the time I tell myself no worries I’ll just post it in the future but then it’s back to problem number one, I either forget to post or the review kinda sucks also cos I’ve forgotten. (Okay I acknowledge the main problem is probably my terrible memory but shh)

Now to try to combat this I have started to try and make sure I am recording notes/feelings as I read through the book and a general statement of how I feel after, but  sometimes I get a little bit carried away with the story and before I know it half the books gone and I’ve got nothing, oops.

My question is how do you manage your reviews? Do your write them straight after you have finished a book and then just schedule them to be posted? Or like me end up writing the review a little while later and if you do how long is too long before the review kind of becomes invalid? Let me know!