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Posted on 07/07/2004 9:09:09 AM PDT by MississippiMalcontent
It's been five months since I stopped reviewing mysteries and crime fiction for the Boston Globe, and still my stomach clenches whenever a UPS or FedEx truck approaches my front door. I dread the thought that the driver will hop out and deliver yet another big shipment of books, all demanding immediate attention, few displaying the craft and precision required to create a vibrant novel and at least one or two gems readers might prize forever.
Writing that monthly column for the Globe was easily the worse job I've ever had, and this coming from a man once responsible for the nightly hamburger run for a dock's worth of Teamsters. The assessment has nothing to do with the Globe or Boston, which, one could argue, is the epicenter of American crime fiction, what with Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, Linda Barnes, Jeremiah Healy, Philip R. Craig and many others setting their books in and around the region. I was delighted to be asked, and happy to write the first few columns.
And then the books started to come.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
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Perhaps it was the worst. But I'm no expert on the English language :-)
Reading books for a LIVING? Yeah...that's one hard life this booklover would KILL to have.
How does one go about getting on the list of publishers as a Book Reviewer?
I don't read many mysteries (not the way my mom does, anyway), but I try to make time for them. Mostly I read classic mysteries, but I also enjoy some more modern fare, such as the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters.
Ouch. Not me.
The problem is that you can't read what you want to read. You read what you're given, and most of it sucks.
Am I supposed to feel sympathy for a guy who had a job of reading books for a living, and whose main problem was where to put all the free books he received from publishers? Boo bleeding hoo.
I worked in a library, which meant the whole town basically paid me to read during my breaks. I don't suppose you'll be sniffling for me either :-)
Not necessarily. Check out this tidbit in Slate about Newsday's review of Clinton's "My Lies:
Novelist Francine Prose spent 12 hours reading My Life—"The first 200 pages very carefully"—and a few hours at the keyboard composing her Newsday review. "It's the sort of book that's writing the review in your head while you're reading," she says....Prose agreed to write the instant review in part because the paper offered a premium rate—which she won't confide.
But her main motivation was the opportunity to write something political. "I knew that regardless of the literary merits of the book, the human being that was going to appear from those pages would be superior to the people in the current administration," Prose says.
So she got paid big bucks for her review, even though she admits she didn't really read the whole thing. And she got to slam the Bush Administration at the same time. What a deal!
I worked in a library, which meant the whole town basically paid me to read during my breaks. I don't suppose you'll be sniffling for me either :-)
Nope, I won't! Reading isn't exactly working in a coal mine! ;)
Well, a good critic would have tried to read the whole thing (a truly vomitericious task) :-)
Larry McMurtry certainly didn't. He wrote the positive review of My Lies for the Times after their real book critic panned the book, yet he didn't mention any specifics in the book to show why it was worth reading, other than that Clinton is great!
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