Posted by Nicole Sheldon, Creative Nonfiction Editor and Art Curator for Issue 4.2
With the spring semester in full swing the SUNY Geneseo campus is bustling with students who are finding that each day is busier than the last. It’s more than a week into February, and here at Geneseo Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith, Editing and Production Manager Allison Brown, and I have launched National Book Review Month, or NaRMo, for the month of February.
The literary world celebrates events such as National Poetry Month and National Novel Writing Month, and we’ve set out to add National Book Review Month to the literary calendar. Book reviews are an often-overlooked part of the literary landscape, and many readers fail to recognize the value in reading and writing reviews. Reading a book review may give you that extra nudge to read that book you meant to indulge in over the summer. Or, perhaps reading a book review would have prevented you from abandoning the novel that wasn’t what you initially expected.
That’s the beauty of book reviews—they’re a way for readers to express their opinions about what they’ve read, and share their views with the rest of the literary world. Word of mouth is great when recommending a book—but publishing reviews online for readers all over the world to see is bound to have a greater impact. Continue reading