There’s something magical about recommending books to people.

I think the same magic can be found with recommending TV shows or movies or what have you, but there’s something weirdly distinct about books. Reading books requires us to be active. Unlike with a TV show or movie, and unlike with a comic book, books expect us to provide the vistas ourselves. We have to conjure up our own vision of the story and setting, and every reader will engage just a little (or very) differently with the text. Everyone creates their own version of the book, even more so than with a more visual medium.

Those differences each reader creates for themselves, and the similarities that remain, are where the magic lies.

No surprise, I love hearing that someone loved a book I recommended. I feel the satisfaction of a job well done. But the really satisfying part is the sense that I understood someone else’s internal world well enough to find them something they would love. These are the similarities that I’m talking about; having found something exemplary or delightful for myself, I can find aspects that I think others might love too. With every recommendation I test my sense of others’ preferences, each book another chance to understand someone else’s palate.

This also means that surprising responses to book recommendations are even more exciting than a simple “I loved it.” People share more about themselves in their explanations of why they loved or hated a book than they might be willing to admit if asked directly. It’s not a perfect source of insight, but it’s a window that can reveal wider truths about a person as they respond to the same text I’ve recommended to multiple other people. The better I’ve understood a text, and the more responses I’ve heard about that text, the more I can learn from others’ reactions to it.

All of which is to say, I believe that enjoying a book can be an intensely personal experience. It certainly can be for me. This personal-ness is why I do my best to ground my book reviews and recommendations by sharing my personal preferences and experiences. The more open I am with how I relate to the text, the better a chance you have of understanding what elements of the book might entice or repel you.

Of course, enjoying a book doesn’t have to be extremely personal. You might just want a book that offers a good time, one that lets you delve into a different world than our own. That’s important too. I hope that my clarity about my own reactions to a text—including when and where and why (and whether) I had fun with a book—makes it easier for you to assess whether you’d have fun too.

Regardless, the better I can convey my experiences of a given book and my perspectives of the world, the better you will be served by my (dis)recommendations. My impersonal critiques do you a disservice. Reviews offered from a place of hypothetical objectivity tell you more about what I think objectivity should be than about whether and why you might enjoy a given book.

Do you want to recommend books too? I wrote this post about recommending books to kids, but a lot of the points I made there apply to recommending books to adults too (surprise, people are people). I know it’s been a minute since I reviewed a book here, but I hope this gives you a window into how and why I approach my reviews the way I do.