This database contains links to all of the book reviews submitted to the ACX book report contests. I think the floor is pretty high for most of these (the mean score for all 2022 submissions was a 7/10), and you can def do worse if you're looking for an overview of a book you want to read. I've found a lot of gems in reviews that never made it to the site, so I wanted to make a way to browse them more easily. Scroll past the table for more details.
In short, scroll until you find a review you like, then click the blue "read review" button to go to read it.
Airtable filters (desktop only) enable you to filter by book publication year ranges, authors, and titles. Filtering by tag, you can find reviews from a specific contest year, reviews that were shortlisted or winners, reviews that review 2+ books ("multibook"), and books with multiple reviews ("2+ reviews") if you want to know exactly which books the posts-writing members of the acx readership go apeshit for.
Note that most of the links here (all 🗂️ reviews and a few 📖 reviews) will drop you to a specific heading in a very long google doc; it will take a while for it to load. Also, on mobile it will fail to take you to the specific header sometimes.
If you must access this page on mobile, I'd strongly recommend viewing the larger version of the airtable (the button on the bottom right of the embed).
🎖️ indicates that the review was a winner for that year (first, second, and third place all counts.) It corresponds to the "Winner" tag.
📖 indicates that the review either made it onto the blog, or was specifically highlighted by Scott. It corresponds to the "Shortlist" tag.
🗂️️ is for all other reviews.
From the 2021* reviews, all the submissions were linked in Open Thread 168, the winners were announced in Book Review Contest Winners and there was also a supplementary packet linked in the Plagues and Peoples review.
For 2022, the submissions were linked in Open Thread 220 and the winners (with additional Scott commentary if you want to check that out) are from Book Review Contest 2022 Winners.
For 2023, the submissions are linked in Open Thread 275 and the winners (with additional Scott commentary if you want to check that out) are from Book Review Contest 2023 Winners.
* These reviews are all actually from 2020; Scott just took a very long unplanned hiatus before getting around to posting them.
Shoot an email to hi@jenn.site. Also get in touch if you want to do something with the data here - I have a more complete table with reviewer names and socials (from the last paragraph here) for the 2021 reviews. I ultimately decided against displaying them for aesthetic reasons since the data was not provided for later years and it would make the invidiual entries too long.