I've been writing a weekly review column at Amazing Stories for long enough now that it's become part of the rhythm of my week. Every week, a book. Every week, a review. More than fifty a year, most years.
People ask me how I find the time. The honest answer is that I don't find it — I make it, because reading is not separate from writing for me. It's the same practice.
What the Column Has Done to My Writing
The most obvious thing: I read more carefully now. When you know you're going to have to articulate what a book is doing — not just whether you liked it, but how it works, what choices the author made, what those choices cost and gained — you read differently. You notice structure. You notice where the prose accelerates and where it breathes. You notice what's left out.
The less obvious thing: it's made me more honest about my own work. When you spend a week with a book that does something brilliantly, and then you sit down to write, you can't pretend you don't know what brilliant looks like. That's uncomfortable. It's also useful.
Why Genre Fiction Specifically
Science fiction and fantasy are the literature of ideas. They ask the questions that realism is too polite to ask directly.
I review science fiction, fantasy, and science — the last category being popular science books, which I think of as nonfiction science fiction. All three are trying to do the same thing: take the world apart and show you how it works, or how it might work, or how it could go wrong.
That's what I want my own books to do. So that's what I read.
A Recommendation
If you've never read at Amazing Stories, start anywhere. The archive is deep. If you want a place to begin, look for my reviews of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, or anything by Ted Chiang. Those are the ones I keep coming back to.