The best part about reviewing for all those magazines (past and present) is that I am always discovering new authors that I might not have discovered otherwise. Through reviews at the various magazines I have written for I found Dan Wells, author of the John Wayne Cleaver and Partials books, and Michelle Gagnon and even David Levithan. If you’ve read any of the previous blog entries you know how I feel about their work. The other best part is the free advance copies. I often get to read really good books first (well, maybe not FIRST), and then I get to share them with family or as prizes at work (the Library). Yeah!
Of course reading this way also means that I encounter authors and books on the opposite end of the spectrum…really stinky books. Books that needed more work before they were published or even books that never should have seen the light of day. And I have to read the whole book…On occasion this is torture. The same was true when I was on Newbery; if another committee member nominated a book, I had to finish reading it…so sometimes books sail across the room at our house. I have a few stories about books that bad (I will tell you if we meet in person)…I have a shelf of books at my house called “crimes against literature” where some of those books live. You can sometimes tell which ones got thrown across the room by their torn covers. One weighty tome of bad poetry flew across the room and ended up with a broken spine (it deserved it)…I don’t advocate book abuse, though! You might guess some of them from my goodreads pages…but certainly not all of those low star-ratings are books I reviewed or books that were bad enough to sail through the air; some are just books I didn’t enjoy that I encountered on my own.
I actually better get reading…there are ten books stacked by the bed right now! Hopefully they are all good (I know several are because I trust their authors already). Maybe they’ll appear in a future blog here! Ya never know.