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The following
will leave you thinking I am a bitchy
ingrate with no understanding of the
tough job book reviewing publications
do. While this is no doubt true, bear
in mind that I still do still serve
as a reviewer for three publications
and run two book reviewing websites.
I just got started in reviewing the
hard--that is 'stupid'-- way... |
It was,
I confess, during a period of particular
poverty that I first took up book reviewing.
It's perfect, right? You get to read books,
write a little about them, and not pay for
them. And as an extra benefit I could use it
to check out publishers I might want to
submit my own manuscripts to later. So I got
right onto Google and found, within minutes,
that there were all sorts of websites
absolutely begging for reviewers. Within a
matter of hours I was signed up with three of
them. I love books; I'm getting free
books--it's like getting free ice-cream, what
could possibly go wrong?
That
was when I had my first lesson in the danger
of analogies. Imagine vegemite ice cream. Or
if you happen to be a particularly perverse
Australasian, imagine anchovy and toothpaste
ice cream--or whatever it takes to make you
go 'ew!' Now I am a deeply feminist creature
so the mainstream of romance can be a little
trying for me. I do not lie in bed at night
fantasizing that Mr. Tall Dark and Caveman
will swing in to do the 'Me Tarzan, You Jane'
forced seduction tango. If any mulletted
highlander tore my best pewter-gray bodice
they would be sitting with a thread and
needle fixing the damn thing before nookie
was back on the menu.
I
signed up with sites that take gay romance, I
requested gay romance. Not wanting to be too
much of a pedant I also asked for paranormal
romance and anything with a strong heroine.
One of the first books I got issued was about
a previously happily married woman being
abducted by another man and trained with
drugs and a shock collar to be his willing
sex slave and baby oven. She wasn't the only
one shocked. Three-dicked queer intergalactic
were-crocodiles with a yoghurt fetish I can
handle, but this was a bit much. Just to rub
it in, meanwhile on the reviewer's forum
another reviewer was exclaiming with
bemusement that she had been given this
bizarre book that was like romance, but
between two men! Can you imagine! Well, yes,
in absence of any books in that genre I
pretty much had to.
All the
while the books, good bad and indifferent,
continued to arrive. It didn't matter if I
had a lot of work to do, a deep need to lie
on the sofa and watch four series of Angel
back-to-back, or the dog ate my modem (as he
is wont to do)-there they were, along with
reminder emails that reviews were due, past
due, and ready to be wrapped in bandages and
stored in a pyramid rather than posted on any
kind of contemporary website. Imagine being
force fed ice cream through a funnel for
three straight days, run around on a roller
coaster and shown a picture of your
grandmother naked doing something
inappropriate with a waffle iron. Then you
are offered some of this anchovy ice cream. I
imagine that by now you can now see where I
am going with this.
Now,
Kurt Vonnegut (apparently) said, "Any
reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for
a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a
person who has put on full armor and attacked
a hot fudge sundae." But you know,
by now I was not really able to take his
point. Under the wrong circumstance ice cream
can really turn on you (rather than, as I had
naively hoped, turn you on). I read stories
where semi-colons roamed free, characters
were named after desert wines, being flogged
to the point of death with an aphrodisiac
and-as far as I could tell-most of them were
set in a parallel world were surly, sadistic
bastards are like catnip and condoms had
never been invented. Not only is there some
ice cream that is not to your taste, I really
was beginning to believe that some things
packaged and sold as ice cream really aren't.
Just as you start to dig in you find the
whole thing is made of rubber or that those
aren't chocolate chips but rat droppings--and
because you agreed to in advance, you had to
eat it anyway. Before, I had been happy for
anyone to write and read any weird damn thing
they wanted, but now I was being made to read
it myself I was slipping to into raging
intolerance one misogynistic clinch and
dangling modifier at a time.
What
happened next is that I began write reviews
that said something like, on the bright side
about two thirds of the words in this book
actually are correctly spelled or Well,
Virginia, if you fantasize about being the
bruised love slave of a sociopathic
Neanderthal, this is the book for you!
"Take
that, fudge sundae! I am the Don Quixote of
deserts!" I proclaimed.
But
review coordinators so do not put up with
that sort of thing, so I retired to my den to
revise the reviews while grumbling darkly
about cruel and creative uses for waffle
irons. As a reviewer you will learn that
there is often a rule against criticizing
formatting despite the fact that this is not
an advanced review copy but a copy of a book
that has been out on shelves for the last
seven and a half years. And, in fact, unless
the book is written in crayon and includes a
denial of the Holocaust, any rating of less
than 3 of the 5 whatever cute symbols are
being employed is pretty much out of the
question.
So now
I am nauseous, eating feces sorbet, and
having to pretend I like it. This is not
really what I had in mind. There are more
books arriving every day, my modem is in the
dog bowl smeared in bacon fat and I have
discovered something about ice cream (and
something rather... disturbing, about
myself).
What is
the best thing about ice cream? You might
think it's the sweetness, the texture, the
butterfat, the taste... but you'd be wrong.
The best thing about ice cream is this: it
waits there on the shelf, all day and all
night, fresh and attractively packaged. You
go to get it when you want it, you pick the
one you want from a wide array of sizes and
flavors, and you take it home. You decide
whether to eat it now, or later, whether to
use utensils or add a little sauce. It is
happy with any decision you make, the ice
cream is only there to please you. If you try
it and don't like it you can shove it down
the insinkerator. And all the ice cream does
is be sweet and gorgeous and willing and
available.
Me
reader, you book. And - what the hell - it
may not be romantic but to get that level of
cooperation, hell, I'll even pay for it.
