Have fun with Book Review Bingo!

Have you ever noticed that book reviews always use the same words? Of course you have, since you are reading a blog that offers book reviews! To my excuse, I can say that English is not my first language and my vocabulary is not as vast as I'd like it to be. Now you can play Book Review Bingo with the overused adjectives while you're reading your book reviews! How funny! I'm culpable of using many of these words myself, here's the list:

compelling
beautifully written
lyrical
in the tradition of
rollicking
tour de force
thought-provoking
at once
haunting
riveting
nuanced
x meets x
cliché-free
stunning
epic
pitch-perfect
readable
timely
unputdownable
that said
gritty
powerful
sweeping
unflinching
fully-realised

What I'm going to do is find out how the bingo would come out in Italian. I'll browse through let's say 100 book reviews from magazines and semi-official blogs in search of over-used adjectives (of course I already have an idea) and then I would check my own reviews in Italian (of course there's not one hundred). "Avvincente" and "appassionante" will most likely make you win the "tombola" (bingo), as they are the Italian counterparts of words like compelling and gripping. The problem with Italian reviews is that for some reason reviewers, even professional ones, don't express their personal opinions and reactions as much as English-speaking reviewers do. They are comfortable with only one or two adjectives that express their opinions per review. By doing this, I think, you fail to give a complete review! You might as well read the back cover of the book and you'd get the same result!