Friday, June 12, 2015

Speaking of Wasting Time...

What do you do when you're blocked on a book manuscript?

Apparently, you write book reviews. I've been updating my CV, and have discovered that, in the last two and a half years, I have written eight book reviews. 

That's too damn many. Still, I guess I had to write something. And most of the books were pretty good. And reading other people's books gives you ideas for things that will and won't work for your own book.

Still: it's time to get back to my work.

2 comments:

Susan said...

I take on book reviews to get FREE books, especially ones I tink I shoukd have read for research or teaching, but which are expensive. I always forget that for book reviews, I can't count on he content to osmose into my brain...

Notorious Ph.D. said...

This is good advice. The only other reason I do these things is that I feel like I'm close enough to the area that I've got some real insight to offer. But I've started saying "no" more often, and it feels like the right thing to do at this moment.

And you're right about the osmosis thing. Reading for a book review requires a much slower and more careful reading, and often crafting and recrafting both praise and criticism, realizing how much may hang on these things, especially in high-profile values. I got really cranky with the two or three reviewers who I thought (a) hadn't read my book carefully, or (b) hadn't bothered to proofread their own reviews. So I try to respect the work the author put in with an appropriate amount of work on my part. And that takes scads of time.