I spend so much time writing about the murky areas of book reviewing that readers may well be wondering if I have any idea what I’m doing. Most reviews, in fact, don’t present esoteric conundrums. But like the 10 o’clock news, I’m most interested in the anomalies, the tough choices, the ethical dilemmas, the miracle babies, and the black-light search of the supposedly clean hotel room. For some scenarios I have clear guidelines to follow. For some, I don’t. Sometimes new conundrums arise, and sometimes I take a new approach.

Fortunately, book reviewers aren’t left alone to drown in a sea of galleys and angry e-mails. Fortunately, there are book review editors.

As I’ve said before, though I am an editor, I don’t assign books for review at Booklist. My job is to prepare reviews and features for Booklist Online, to help create Web-only content, and to be the point man for ongoing development and technical issues. And to write this blog. And to demonstrate the product at conferences. And to stand ready with a wrench when a wrench is required.

The vast majority of our content is commissioned or created by the editors of Booklist. They’ve been doing the job for a long time and they’re very good at it. So if a reviewer isn’t sure how to handle something, the editor can often provide an answer based on precedent, knowledge of the industry, or understanding of the audience. (Even if it’s just a guess they’re very good at giving guesses the guise of authority.)

I’ve gone to my editors many times with questions about matters both large (how do I review I book that I hate but that I think has an audience?) and small (how do I style citations of previous works?). Sometimes the editor will fix a problem I didn’t know I had and I won’t even know until I read the finished product in the magazine. I always welcome this, except when the edit makes a travesty of my brilliant argument (in some circles, a lack of subject-verb agreement is considered a sophisticated literary device). Due to the volume of work, we don’t always have time to discuss matters over tea and crumpets. (But on the days that we do, wow!)

There are myriad decisions that must be made correctly to ensure that a review is well-written and useful, and these start before the reviewer even receives the book - with the editor. The editor first decides which books will be considered for review and which won’t (Booklist is a recommended-only journal, which I will explain in a future post). Then the editor decides who will review the book. This second decision, putting the right book in the right hands, is almost as weighty as the first.

Give the right book to the right reviewer and the reader will get an informative, helpful review. Give the book to the wrong reviewer and a delicate balance is upset: somewhere, another species goes extinct. Or, more likely, the review will be off balance. Someone who’s never reviewed a gardening book may focus on the parts of least interest to green thumbs, or worse, be bored by a work that avid horticulturalists would find worthy of a starred review.

Give a fantasy book to someone who reviews literary fiction - especially a book in an ongoing series - and you’re likely to get a hesitant evaluation steeped in puzzlement. Those are pretty obvious scenarios. Splitting things even finer, a reviewer who reviews only mysteries is still not necessarily a candidate for all mysteries. An expert in cozies might close his eyes through the gory parts of a grim police procedural.

The task might be described as finding the reviewer who most closely fits with the book’s intended audience. But that’s easier to say than to do. It’s not always obvious what a book is going to be like (publicists’ blurbs sometimes bear as much relation to a book’s contents as the hype-filled copy on the back of a rental DVD). The pool of available reviewers is not infinite. And, with hundreds of books pouring in the doors every day, these are decisions that can’t be decided over the aforementioned cup of tea.

Brad Hooper is the Adult Books Editor of Booklist. No, he doesn’t work with naughty books - at least, not exclusively - and yes, he’s heard that joke before. (He does like a cup of tea, although I’ve never seen him assigning books while under the influence.)

I asked him yesterday about how he makes sure the right books get into the right hands. With 30-plus years experience in the book-reviewing biz (something you’d never guess to look at him), many of these decisions have become largely intuitive for him. But there is method to what he does.

First of all, “nonfiction is easier,” he says. Nonfiction reviewers are chosen for their expertise in a particular area, whether crafts and hobbies or U.S. history, and their track record with us. Nonfiction reviewers tend to have what the newspapermen call a “beat”. Mark Knoblauch covers cookery, for example, and David Siegfried covers business. The longer they review for us, the more valuable their expertise becomes, because they can compare any new book in their discipline to what’s come before it, letting readers know what’s new, what’s not, and what’s worthwhile.

Fiction is harder for a lot of reasons. First of all, says Brad, quality of prose counts a bit less in both nonfiction books and in the reviews of those books. “A librarian isn’t necessarily reading a gardening review for the beauty of its prose,” he says. “Fiction is a different story. The reviewer has to be able to take it to a different level.”

While there’s undeniably a huge class of narrative nonfiction that relies on sterling prose and supple storytelling (and sometimes, sumptuous and lovely alliteration), a large class of nonfiction books is simply about conveying information. And reviews of those books need to convey the information that they convey. The prose of a fiction review must be able to convey the beauty - or lack thereof - of the book’s prose.

Also, more nonfiction books are cut at the point of selection. It’s a lot harder to tell whether a novel will interest readers without reading it. So a greater percentage of novels tend to get assigned for review, though some of those will be rejected by the reviewer. (How can a reviewer reject a book altogether? Once again, this has to do with Booklist’s recommended-only policy.) Selecting fiction for review, says Brad, is one of those areas where he must rely more heavily on intuition and experience. He can’t judge a book by its cover - not usually, anyway - but his time in the trenches helps him decide quickly who can judge the book.

New fiction reviewers, if they don’t arrive with a genre specialty, will be tried out on a few “garden-variety novels or short-story collections,” with enough time to reassign the review if necessary. “We would never give a major author to someone who couldn’t hit the ground running,” Brad says.

“But honestly,” he continues. “You can tell right away. If they can’t handle a 175-word review the first time out, that’s it.” Despite the low pay, Brad notes that there’s a lot of competition to write the reviews. A lot of it comes from staff members, who generally get first consideration for more coveted writers.

A reviewer who proves himself with small books and lesser authors will gradually get better assignments - I’ve climbed that ladder myself - though it’s not likely any young upstart will be prying John Updike from Brad’s hands any time soon.

Even if he knows the perfect reviewer for a given book, Brad still has to contend with that reviewer’s workload. If the reviewer already has her hands full, is it worth reprioritizing existing reviews? Or is it better to simply find another reviewer? These decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

And once in awhile, changes are made. Sometimes a reviewer will decide that they prefer not to review an author they’ve done for a long time. Maybe they’re burned out, or maybe they feel they’re no longer the best person to write the review. (If they don’t “get” the appeal, maybe there’s someone who does.) Or maybe Brad feels it’s time to shake up Booklist’s take on a well-known author.

So maybe he will give me the next Updike.

Yeah, right.

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Yesterday I wrote about a mention of a Booklist review in the book I’m reviewing for Booklist, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. The pre-pub reviews of Gerald Weber’s book have come in, and his editor tells him that the Kirkus review is “a little mixed” but the Booklist review is “to die for.”

(FYI, I looked up the reviews of Powers’ last novel, The Time of Our Singing, and both Kirkus and Booklist starred it. The idea of Kirkus being more critical and Booklist being more positive does fit with the cliche, as Joanne Wilkinson pointed out to me yesterday, which reminds me that I need to write in the future about why Booklist reviews always seem so positive. Anyway, moving on…)

This morning, I came across a new passage that discusses reviews in even more depth. I don’t want to give away any plot - this is about halfway through the book - but let’s just say that Weber’s book is now about to be published and another review has just come in. Weber bicycles to the library to read it:

Obscene, looking up a review of his work. Like Googling his own name…He wrote for the insight of the phrase, to locate, in some strange chain, its surprise truth. The way a reader received his stories said as much about the reader’s story as about the story itself. No final judgment. Anything this reviewer might say was just part of the distributed network, signals cascading through the fragile ecosystem. What could a pan or praise matter to him? 

But he cares what his daughter thinks, and his daughter has read the review but not the book. Therefore:

…she’d be reading, inescapably, the book this review created, in her mind. Best to know what other volumes were now floating around, spun from the one he wrote. 

Weber reads the review, and it’s bad. (It’s in Harper’s, by the way.) His thoughts must be common to many writers.

In the field of public reviewing, one scored zero for appreciating an already appreciated figure. With a target as large as Gerald Weber, one earned points only for a kill. 

There’s truth to that statement, but it’s more complicated than that. In general, people like to be in agreement. They want to be in agreement on greatness - who is great at the moment - but if mass sentiment decrees that the great one’s time has passed, no one want to be left holding the wrong opinion. So people are always sniffing the air for signs that the group opinion is about to change. Of course, Powers (through Weber), anticipates me (see? we’re having a dialog!):

…people flocked. Already, the core of the intelligentsia, wet forefingers in the air, were gauging the change in the prevailing winds. 

Finally, Weber assesses the damage the review might do.

For every twenty people who read the review, one, with luck, might read the book, while the others would describe it to friends in dismissive terms, without the inconvenience of having to look at it. 

That’s a scary thought - people using reviews as a kind of CliffsNotes or executive summary, so they can have an opinion about something they haven’t actually read. Ideally, Booklist reviews are road maps, helping people find what they’re looking for. (Long-form reviews can also help people tease other deeper meaning out of books.)

The Echo Maker is not, obviously, a book about book reviews. And I can’t assume that Gerald Weber’s thoughts about reviews stand in for Richard Powers’. But as a reviewer who writes about reviewing, I find this particular thread of the book fascinating.

But I’ll be writing about the other stuff, too, certainly when I write my review.

Last night I was reading Richard Powers’ new novel, The Echo Maker. It’s about a man, Mark Schluter, who suffers brain damage in a car accident. He develops Capgras syndrome, which makes him think that certain people close to him are impostors. One of these is his sister, Karin Schluter, who has quit her job to care for Mark and now finds herself despondent at Mark’s constant requests to produce his “real” sister.

Karin writes a letter to Gerald Weber, a cognitive neurologist whose books weave case histories of bizarre brain disorders into compelling narratives with bestselling appeal - a bit like Oliver Sacks. Weber is reluctant to become personally involved, and anxious to move toward more pure research, but is intrigued by the rarity of Mark’s case (Capgras resulting from an accident is almost unheard of). He travels from Long Island to Nebraska to examine Mark.

The book has rich use of language and a provocative blend of science and philosophy (two disciplines that seem more and more inseparable). I’m sure I’ll be writing more about Powers’ powerful prose, but a passage I read last night made me think more about myself.

And no, not because I think the people in the offices next to mine have been replaced with people who look, talk, and act exactly like them. I do think that - “Ray Olson” is obviously an actor - but this is a blog about book reviewing, not the government’s elaborate plan to replace everyone and everything in my life with an exact replica.

In one scene, Weber calls his editor, who tells him that the reviews for his latest book are starting to come in:

The Kirkus review is a little mixed, but the Booklist is to die for. 

Now, reading a book that explores how the brain weaves external and internal stimuli into its own version of reality - I felt as if my synapses had suddenly decided to mix things up a little. Here I was, reading a book for review, evaluating it but also losing myself in the narrative, when I came across a mention of a fictional character responding to the kind of real-life review I’ll be writing when I’m done. In its own small way, it was like watching a movie and glimpsing myself in the background.

I write a lot about the impossibility of achieving true objectivity as a book reviewer, and the many complications that can sabotage even the simple goal of writing down an honest opinion. I haven’t written much about ego yet, but ego is, of course, a big part of reviewing - not everyone who reads a book feels compelled to publish their opinion of it.

Anticipating what readers will think about my opinion might cause me to second-guess myself. Wondering or worrying what publishers and authors will think is even worse. We do get to know some publishers and authors in this line of work, and it’s a balancing act to ensure that professional friendliness doesn’t become friendship. It’s a natural human trait to want to please the people who please us.

There’s insecurity (do I seem smart enough? do I have the right opinion)? and its cousin, pride (my opinion is important!). Honestly, thinking about it too much is enough to make a book reviewer afraid to review books.

Of course, I have to think my opinion is helpful to people - that’s what drives me to work hard and write well. But thinking too much of it - thinking that it matters - keeps me from simply getting down what I think of the book, and gets me back to thinking how my opinion will appear to people.

I do my best to ignore the idea of people reading my reviews, because it makes the whole exchange too complicated. Yet having a writer with the stature of Richard Powers mention Booklist reviews, even in a minor scene, seems to affirm their importance. It’s enough to make me hook my thumbs in my imaginary suspenders and puff out my mental chest (sorry about that turn of phrase) just because I’m part of the process. If Powers reads his reviews, then in a way, I’m having a dialog with him.

And who needs that kind of pressure?

Well, the 22nd annual Printer’s Row Book Fair wrapped up yesterday. Nearly 100,000 book lovers enjoyed the chance to browse nearly 200 book stalls; to hear fascinating readings, interviews, and panels; to have their photos taken with one of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are; and to drink beer.

E. L. Doctorow and John Updike were there, as were A. Manette Ansay, Blue Balliett, Bill Buford, Augusten Burroughs, Michael Connelly, Stuart Dybek, Dave Eggers, Tess Gallagher, Nikki Giovanni, Aleksandar Hemon, Carol Higgins Clark, Erica Jong, Mark Kurlansky, Studs Terkel, and Scott Turow, to name just a few. Booklist’s own Donna Seaman appeared on two panels, “The Art of the Review,” and “Technology, Obsolescence, and E-wastes in America.”

The weather was perfect and everyone had an amazing time. What a wonderful convergence of books, people, and ideas - what a superb setting! It’s going to take me a week just to unpack the books I bought and to decipher the many mots I scribbled in my Moleskine.

Actually, I managed to visit the fair without buying a book, seeing an author, or drinking a beer. My wife and I took our two kids (almost two years and almost two months), one in a backpack and one in a front pack. We cruised the aisles, said hi to a few friends, and I managed to browse precisely two book stalls, one selling mysteries and one selling “Subversive literature for the whole family since 1886.”

Our two-year-old doesn’t seem to mind riding in the backpack as long as I don’t stop moving. And the two-month-old doesn’t seem to mind riding in the Baby Bjorn as long as there are frequent stops. Letting the two-year-old out of the pack is kind of like opening one of those old prank cans of peanuts that actually has a spring-loaded snake inside: you don’t know where the snake is going to go, and it’s really hard to get it back in the can.

It was a beautiful day and, as anyone who has lined his walls with books he will never get around to reading can tell you, there is something nice about just being around a lot of books, even if you don’t have time to open them at that exact moment.

The plot of Jeremy Blachman’s Anonymous Lawyer is pretty simple. A hiring partner at a big law firm starts an anonymous blog as a lark, a way to vent frustrations and take potshots at his colleagues. The blog catches on, and his gratification at finding an audience is balanced with his fear of being found out. He can’t stop himself, and of course he is found out, giving those who’ve discovered him an opportunity to tip the balance of power.

Anonymous is obsessed with becoming chairman of the firm, and this single plot thread drives the entire book. (There’s a subplot in which he causes his niece to question her high ideals, but there’s no action involved.) Normally, that wouldn’t be enough, but I think it is in this case. Blachman’s given his character such a clean, malevolent, hilarious voice that his exhilarating spite alone propels us through the first half, and then the machinery of the plot carries us to the end just when the voice starts to feel a bit repetitive.

Besides becoming chairman, Anonymous is obsessed with two things: making sure everyone works hard enough and maintaining the firm’s rigid hierarchy. Everything is brutally competitive. He refers to “winning” friendly-seeming conversations and uses a paper-clip chain to measure his rival’s office (his own is seven square feet larger).

Some choice quotes:

Kids waste too much time in law school thinking about justice and fairness, and not enough time learning what’s important. 

I’d also like to ban associates putting pictures of their family on their desks. I’ve thought about this for a while. It’s harder to yell at someone when you’re looking at a picture of his kids.

…as a partner, I’m allowed to turn my BlackBerry off while I’m sleeping.

My shoulder hurts from throwing a pair of scissors at my secretary last week.

It’s a feat to make readers want to spend 300 pages with a jerk, but Blachman pulls it off. Anonymous finds himself in his writing - always fighting his instincts to be a better person - and his insecurity makes his arrogance bearable. This is that great cliche, a great summer read. The plot won’t stay with readers, but some of the lines probably will. In fact, it might make a good movie, if someone can figure out how to do it without telling the whole thing in voiceover.

I read a bit of Blachman’s blog, by the way. It reads a lot like the book. Too bad he writes in character, or we could get a blog dialog - a blogalog? - going.

I’m trying to think of novels with deeply unsympathetic protagonists in corporate settings. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) comes to mind, of course….