Writing a book review makes me physically ill. Or let me rephrase: writing a book review that will be made public makes me physically ill. Factors that contribute to this illness include: the packs of cigarettes chain-smoked alongside the triple-shot Americanos that transition in the late afternoon to the bottle of wine required to finally finish and send the review to the editor; and my own personal neuroses, including an entrenched, crippling self-consciousness that everyone who reads my review, especially the author, is going to think I’m an idiot.

I wanted to email the author of the last book I reviewed, Vi Khi Nao, and apologize to her for not discussing the film Flowers of Shanghai in my review; I wanted to tell her that I wanted to write about how I saw The Vanishing Point of Desire as a form of parametric narration, that I saw her book as an analog to Hsiao-hsien Hou’s beautiful film, but that I was afraid that I was full of shit.

To prepare for a review of Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, I read Peter and Wendy, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and The Little White Bird; I read every book Boully mentions in the afterword before I even approached her words. In hindsight, I wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Yes, this exercise of mine added a layer of understanding, because Boully directly incorporates and italicizes lines from these source texts in her book, and being familiar with them created new opportunities for engagement. But in no way do I think this kind of “preparation” is needed to appreciate Boully’s beautiful book. And while my attempt to understand these connections has real value for me as a writer, was I pointing the audience to J.M. Barrie’s books instead of Boully’s? Was my approach more a “Look what I did! I cracked the code of the book,” that I should have instead sent her in a private letter? Would she even care? Just who am I writing these book reviews for?

Many of these questions might stem from the fact that I have approached my reviews the same way I approached discussing books in graduate school. And this is my ultimate problem. I did my PhD with intimidatingly intelligent, generous thinkers, people who became my friends and my most valued readers. But in my first workshop, discussing the first book assigned, I had difficulty articulating how deeply the author’s work moved me; this was the kind of reaction I have always savored and hoped to have when reading. I wanted to share this experience with my classmates. But when I did, well, let’s just say that if my over-sensitive memory serves correct, it didn’t go over so well. I felt like an idiot for approaching the book from the personal and for making these feelings public. It was a terrible lesson to learn: the emotional pleasures of a book should be kept private.

A few summers ago, while sitting on the shores of Nebraska’s Lake McConaughy, I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and felt utterly destroyed. Because I loved this book, in a guttural way I couldn’t find the “right” language for, I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. The same happened with Jose Saramago’s Blindness and so many other books in the years that have followed. I won’t talk about them because I don’t want to relive that moment in grad school ever again. This is the proof that something has been lost in me.

But this self-consciousness hadn’t yet accumulated during my MFA. I remember the joy of struggling to explain why Harry Mathews had made me a born-again reader, or admitting to the class that I hadn’t yet finished Georges Perec’s A User’s Manual because it had so inspired me to write that I had to put it down. This was when my failure to be able to explain my reactions wasn’t a weakness so much as a generative place: the joy of reading that I need to inhabit as a writer.

And I want to find this place again. There’s plenty of people who write reviews this way. Take Lily Hoang’s “Fan Mail” at HTML Giant. Her letter to Michael Kimball, about his book Us, so wonderfully makes moot the earlier question of a review’s audience. Her public, direct address to the author, takes him, his book and the readers of the review into an embrace so personal, so heartfelt and intelligent that I bought the book the same day.

Or (and I hope you appreciate the difficulty and subsequent failure of transitioning to this next paragraph) take the hysterical, yet amazingly astute album reviews written by someone impersonating Ghostface Killah. On “Made in America,” from Jay Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne, the Fake Ghostface writes:

“First of all son….Lionel Richie called from 1986 n said he wants his song back yo. Word. Sade jus holla’d on twitter to say this shit is soft as fuck namsayin. I think Elton John wants to conceive babies to this joint… I heard this shit gon be used for the next Gwyneth Paltrow movie too. I dont kno how the same nigga that did Who Gon Stop Me had anything to do wit this shit but apparently he did nahmean. This shit sounds like two niggas hang glidin over the ocean together at sunset holdin hands son.”

What could I possibly say about how perfectly these images reflect the experience of listening to this song that hasn’t already been written in this review?

Now take a look at what the Los Angeles Times ’ Randall Roberts wrote of this same song: “The album’s highlight, and an instant classic, is ‘Made in America,’ a solid, slow-paced Frank Ocean-teamed jam about the American dream that reveals the main difference between West and Jay-Z: humility.”

Now I see it. I’ve been too worried about trying to “explain” a book, to decode how it “became,” a process few writers would be able to articulate anyway. In this worry, my self-consciousness bloomed into something ugly and unuseful. Fake Ghostface Killah and Lily Hoang’s reviews succeed because they find a way to share an experience; maybe that experience comes from having read source texts or having read or listened to a writer/artist’s entire oeuvre, and maybe not. Regardless, the personal experience of reading a book can’t be wrong; sharing it can’t make me an idiot, even if I’ll never write anything as fabulous as Fake Ghostface’s review of “Lift Off” from Watch the Throne: “This shit is like Shia LeBeouf in song form yo.”