So As I Was Saying . . .

Apparently I've read fifty-something books since June 18, in my "spare time". (Three of them at the airport alone). Unfortunately, the side effects of swallowing vast amounts of chick lit are myriad.

First, for me at least, reading large quantities of sometimes mediocre writing always arouses my own competitive instincts. As I read yet another story about a lady named Chloe who works in a hair salon and longs for love, I find myself thinking, "I could do better than this. Why isn't this book better written?" And once again, I am dragged away from my academic writing (Not that 20,000 words on the history of genocide, due by July 15 isn't enthralling and all) as I find myself plotting yet another novel that I will never write. (The latest brainstorm is a series of 'inspirational' novels about military wives, who learn to just give up and trust God as they are dragged from yet once unfathomable hellhole to another, all the while wondering if their marriage, children and sanity will survive.)

Secondly, there's a tendency to become somewhat analytical, the more you read of one genre or another. The thing is, back when I was serious about writing an novel, I devoured vast books about the mechanics of: character development; how to write dialogue; how to plot a novel so that all the loose ends are tied up by the end of the story; how to write a great opening sentence, paragraph or chapter; how to create conflict and drama; how to develop your writer's voice and so forth. As a result, I tend to be really aware of those things now as I read other's writings and find myself thinking things like "Wow. That's an amazing first chapter. She managed to bring us all up to speed on the lives of the characters earlier in this series, so that even a first time reader now knows that Chloe: used to be a nun; is a military child; is thirty-seven years old and longs to be a mother even though she had a hysterectomy for fibroids sometime about ten years ago; etc. etc. etc. " I read a book yesterday (which I haven't yet reviewed because I can't remember the title and I left it at home) where it was really obvious to me that a new character was being introduced on page 150 so that the main character would have someone to lean on by the end when she gave birth. I once described this phenomena to a friend as watching a trapeze act and noticing the wires holding up the artists, and once you notice them, it's as though you become so transfixed by them that you can no longer simply turn your mind off and enjoy the trapeze act. Apparently reading fifty something chick lit novels in something resembling two weeks has the same sort of effect -- unfortunately, now when I read chicklit I can see the wires.

Back to my real job, now. Teaching in five hours and no CLUE what I am going to say. What a shame I can't lecture about chick lit!

I'm Back!

Weekly Stats:
New Reader Rank: Somewhere around 3716! Yes, that's right in the 3000's now. Cruising right on up the charts.

Books Reviewed: Somewhere around 57.
Average helpfulness: 85 percent. A one percent drop-off this week, but more about that in this post.
Books Read this weekend: 3
Flights taken: 4 (Norfolk-Philadelphia-Albany-LaGuardia-Norfolk)
Kids dropped off at camp: 1
Husbands retired from the military: 1
Altercations with the mother in law avoided: countless
Excedrin? Yes, most definitely. Extra STrength.
Size of my butt in photos of husband's retirement ceremony: Gi-normous.
Women who attended the retirement ceremony who appear to have a crush on my husband: 1
Number of balloon animals my father produced at the retirement ceremony reception: 12 (mostly poodles, in case you were wondering)
General ugliness of my parent's dog: Unfathomable

So that about covers last week:
Wednesday -- collect various and sundry relatives from airports for husband's upcoming retirement ceremony
Thursday -- Husband's retirement ceremony followed by gigantic backyard barbecue
Friday -- drop various relatives and hangers-on back at the airport and back child for trip
4 AM on Saturday -- drive to airport with child for flight to upstate New York. Day spent with parents in what is (correctly) known as "the Adams Family House."
Sunday -- drive child to camp in Adirondack Mountains, then fly home to Norfolk, arriving home at 11:15 PM
Monday -- wake up, be astounded at ranking on amazon.com, fight with husband about whose turn it is to drive remaining children to swim practice, be sad about how fat I look in the retirement party photos, blog and go to work
I have piles of midterms and papers to grade, two lectures to give, and I expect to sleep somewhere around Wednesday. But good to know that I'm still pumping out the reviews and climbing in the ranks. Now if I could just figure out how to stop spending all my money on books . .

Happy Anniversary to Me!

In case you're wondering, number fourteen is the storm door anniversary.

We've never been big romantics, Eric and I -- perhaps because our first child was a honeymoon baby, so therefore we've never really had a romantic anniversary. Anniversary one was spent with my in-laws, several other relatives and a screaming baby. (We were in transit to a foreign assignment, and decided to christen the baby on our first anniversary -- at my in-laws house, of all things.) I celebrated our second anniversary during an Army medevac to Germany from Eastern Europe, due to premature labor. (Yes, by our second anniversary I was eight months pregnant with our second child.) Since my husband was still in Eastern Europe and I was there with a one year old, there was no celebration. Third anniversary? Kind of a similar pattern. As an Army wife, I can count on one hand the number of occasions we've actually been together in the same place for an anniversary.

We'll be celebrating this one with my MIL, who arrives at noon today. Eric and I did, however, get to have a romantic cup of coffee together this morning on the porch -- before the mayhem sets in. (Just to make things REALLY interesting, a friend's child was removed from the Boy Scout camp in our area that was closed down due to the swine flu outbreak on Monday. So when our youngest spiked a fever last night, we went into full panic mode. Is it swine flue? What if it is? Can we cancel the MIL's trip? what about the boy who's being dropped at music camp on Saturday? What about the retirement ceremony tomorrow? What about the horde of revelers due to arrive for a barbecue on the same day? Thankfully, the child appears to be fine -- but there's nothing like a little panic to start off your day.)

Anyway, my husband told me something different this morning. I suppose you're always amazed when someone tells you something about themselves that you didn't know, particularly when you've been married for 14 years (or as a friend from our church group phrases it, "the seven year itch times two.") In this case, Eric revealed that he's never really liked being the center of attention, and that's why he never seeks out leadership positions in the community and so forth. That's why he's being such a bear (I think) about the ceremony tomorrow. I found myself wondering to what degree that's cultural -- his grandma survived the Armenian genocide and she lived with them while the kids were growing up. The first stage of the genocide was the part where they rounded up all the prominent people, all the political leaders and all the intellectuals -- perhaps the lesson he learned was "don't stand out. Fly under the radar. Get A's but not the top grades. Don't draw attention to yourself." It explains a certain amount about his personality. He more or less said that he gets nervous, feeling that if you're recognized by your community, then you're more likely to wind up on somebody's radar and lose it all. It's a strange sentiment, and one I'm not altogether familiar with. (Actually, I have this weird idea that he's secretly been attending some form of therapy, because every once in awhile he comes up with these insights that don't sound like him. Isn't that odd? And I notice him utilizing these weird coping techniques when I get out of joint about his mom, like AGREEING WITH ME, which he's never done before. Weird how you can know someone and not know them, you know?)

Updates

I will no longer be posting daily updates on my amazon.com ranking -- but will be posting those weekly (on Monday morning) instead. Also, if anybody knows how I can install some form of ticker on my website (like one of those charts that shows how your stocks are doing), can you post a link in the comments? I think it would be awesome to be able to show how it goes up (and hopefully not down).

Only read two books today -- for a total of 49 reviews. Looking forward to hitting the 100 reviews mark soon, hopefully.

Things are a bit crazy in my house as we prepare for my husband's military retirement ceremony on Thursday. My mother in law arrives tomorrow for what I like to think of as her annual inspection ceremony. Strange, she doesn't have a lot complimentary to say about my professional accomplishments -- but she's all over that tomato sauce that's stuck to the front of the inside of the dishwasher. She'll find that and discuss it for weeks.

And what's with those people who refer to their kids as "my Charles" and "My Sally." And if I've been married to the particular child for upwards of fourteen years, doesn't he at some point become "My Charles"? It just seems odd, that's all. (Speaking of the mother in law).

And we're expecting somewhere between six and one hundred people for our backyard barbecue following the retirement ceremony. I blame the children for the uncertainty regarding the numbers -- and my husband, because most of the people he invited are from obscure countries in the former Soviet Union -- and so they RSVP and say something like "Alloooo, Dis is Mr. EERTYUUSHSH KKKKLLLUUV. I will be at the party, yes?" and my kids write down "Some foreign guy called and said he's coming to the barbecue." And I can't for the life of me figure out if these are DIFFERENT foreign guys or just the same one calling multiple times. And don't even get me started on the messages left on the answering machine. I think they're ALL named EERTYUUUSH KKKLLUUUV, and our answering machine doesn't have the greatest reception anyway. So don't blame me if we run out of beer. Maybe the foreign dudes will bring some. You never know.

What type of review works best

This is the point at which I’m going to take you on a little detour through the world of literary theory. I promise you it will be interesting, and I will try to keep it as short as possible. In general, there are two ways of looking at literature (and if you want more than that, you might try “How to Read a novel like an English Professor” which I confess I initially bought of guilt, because it’s another one of those topics which I felt that I should know something about.)
In short, I am a constructivist (as are many of you, I am sure), while our friend Harriet clearly is not. A constructivist is someone who feels that there is no such thing as an inherent meaning to be found and identified in any object, piece of writing or event. A constructivist does not care to try and find out what the author’s “original intent” was when he or she was first writing Wuthering Heights or A Room of One’s Own. Nothing has just one meaning, nor does it have a fixed meaning.
Are you tracking so far? Those peole who feel that a book only has one meaning and that that meaning is “what the author intended” are usually referred to as positivists. They think that you can basically take the measure of any event, happening or piece of writing in a mathematical way, with mathematical precision, as though literature were just another brand of science. If you find a passage in Proust where he is talking about a saucepan, it might be appropriate to analyze exactly what word he was using in French, and to lok at exactly what types of saucepans were for sale in his particular village in France at that time. Under no circumstances would it be appropriate to assume that although he used the word saucepan, he was really thinking about a boat, or even to state that we, being products of twenty-first century America, have no right even attempting to figure out what he might have meant when he wrote saucepan. Am I making sense so far?
A constructivist, in contrast, draws meaning from an event or a passage by making a relational meaning. That is, something is only meaningful if it has been filtered through your own experiences. In the case of Proust and the saucepan, this would mean that it would be perfectly reasonable for you to consider not only Proust’s own saucepan experiences, but your own as well. If this passage ended up reminding you of a certain camping trip you took with the girl scouts back in 1976, this would not lead to a “wrong” interpretation of the passage. Rather, it would lead to an idiosyncratic rendering of the passage which gave the story meaning for you. In other words, a constructivist would have no problem with your writing about how Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina reminded you of your old boyfriend, or how Madame Bovary reminded you of a time when you felt similarly empty and unfulfilled in your marriage. I suspect that everyone who reviews a book on amazon in which they use the phrases “the characters just didn’t feel believeable to me” or “I wasn’t convinced” is actually a constructivist. These are the women (moi included here) who read chick lit to figure out why they don’t have a boyfriend or a good relationship, and who treat books like pharmaceuticals. And I suspect that the publishers know this – unconsciously if not consciously. They package their “medicine” in familiar packages and colors so that we can identify and grab hold of our drug of choice, disappearing into the stories as we attempt to make sense of our own lives. Pink for the unhappy single girl, blue for the fortyish hausfrau rubbed raw by the pain and emotion of a loveless marriage, green for the “going not all that gently into that good night” lady in her sixties, still trying to make sense of her life as a whole. Why do we read? It depends on who we are.

Intro, part Four

My theory here is that Harriet is very clear on who she is. She’s a reader. She’s not a writer manqué. She doesn’t read every book somehow on some level secretly convinced that she could have written it better herself – like some of us do. Me? Guilty as charged. I have two unpublished novels sitting under my bed – one is a little chick lit romp about a woman whose life is so boring that she feels compels to make up things so she can scrapbook them with her girlfriends (autobiographical? Says who?), while the other is a somewhat darker chick lit novel about a women’s bunco club in a certain Tidewater subdivision whose newest member turns out to be the reincarnation of the witch of Pungo (and if you’ve never heard of the real life historic Witch of Pungo you may either go look it up on Wikipedia, or you may, a la our heroine harriet decide that it really doesn’t matter and you didn’t need to know about it anyway). Neither one has been published (and truth be told, the second one hasn’t actually even been finished) though I came darned close on that first one! Had several reads by some prominent literary agents, but somehow still got that note saying, “Sorry. Not right for us.” And this after, of course, having devoured multiple how-to volumes on: how to write a novel, how to improve a novel, how to sell a novel, how to get an agent, and so forth. Harriet? Nary a whisper of interest in the topic.
All of which has left me with a bit of a mystery. Here she is the number one reviewer, arguably the most influential voice on amazon.com – and it’s a voice that lacks personality. Where is the humor? The rancor? The aggression? Can she truly say that she never read anything that made her angry? That startled her, frightened her, rocked her world? All I’m saying is that this seems strange for a librarian, for someone who has devoted her life to books.
Here’s my take on it: If you ask me, Harriet Klausner is the Antonio Salieri of book reviewing. Do you remember him? He was the guy who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s contemporary. He’s the narrator for the play “Amadeus.” He’s the guy who wakes up early every morning, sits down at a desk and cranks out yet another symphony every year. He’s Mr. Productivity. Not Mr. Ingenuity and not a genius by any means, but someone who feels that he deserves to be an award-winning composer, simply by virtue of the fact that he’s more disciplined than his competition.
Now I’m not saying that I’m Mozart or anything, but I will tell you that it was Mozart that I was cheering for in that movie. Undisciplined, immature, full of outbursts Mozart. Who was great when he sat down and did some work, but most of the time he didn’t. When he did, what he produced was genius – moving, touching and unique. Clearly a cut above the astonishing large piles of drivel produced by Salieri, his competitor.
So there you have it. As I read all these reviews by harriet Klausner, this crazy idea started brewing in my mind. Someone needed to unseat her. Someone needed to unseat the smug librarian who never reveleaed anything personal in her reviewers, who never “loved, loved, loved” a review, who never sought salvation or absolution in a book, who never used too many exclamation points. Someone like, well, someone like me. For I am the anti-Harriet.
What do I read? Why do I read? Well, if you were to pull up my reviews on amazon.com for the past year, here’s what you’d see. I ordered:
-4 books on dealing with a child who is underachieving in school (and here I’ll freely confess I was seeking absolution, not help. It’s the same reason I’ll always buy any book with the words Bad and Mother in the title. I wanted to be told that ti wasn’t my fault and that Some Children are Just Like That (which would make a wonderful title for a book, by the way. You may use it if you like.)).
-3 books on fixing your marriage, one on learning to communicate better and one on how to stop being such a bitch (seeking salvation, not absolution here. I really do want to stop being such a bitch.)
-4 books on improving your spiritual life (most of the born-again Christian variety, though I’ll occasionally dabble in something new agey)
-countless diet books (none of which have really helped significantly. I’m still fat.)
-books on academic writing and avoiding procrastination
Are we sensing a pattern here? Perhaps reading about solving problems instead of actually solving them yourself? Kind of like the way that we’d all rather read a good cookbook or one about exercise than actually preparing the meals or taking the walk. You might even label me as undisciplined – as someone who seldom exercises, wakes up early, as someone who’s always looking for a short cut on how to clean my house (try a book by Don Aslett on that subject), as someone who is, well, fat.
Clearly, I am NOT nearly as secure as good old Harriet Klausner. I worry all the time – that I am a bad mother, a bad wife, that I am fat, that I don’t exercise enough, and that I should be more productive at work and at home. And clearly when I read a book, I AM seeking something – a fix for my problems, and somehow despite my many, many abortive attempts at fixing these problems, I still go on seeking, convinced that there, somewhere in that vast amazon warehouse lies a book (prefereably one with a pink cover and maybe a graphic of someone drinking something) that contains the answer, the SOLUTION, to all my problems. Salvation – randomly typing things into the internet

Intro, Part Three

Once again, here’s a place where Harriet is completely unlike me. I tend to go off half-cocked, act (and speak and write) before thinking, only later realizing it’s too late to reel my words back in, to wish them unsaid. Much of my life is spent wishing for a do-over. And I feel guilty, a lot. Somehow I feel that although I’m a political science professor, I should know more – about everything. I read to close up and fill the gaping holes of ignorance which I’m constantly identifying in myself. I’m not entirely sure who Lloyd George is, or Lloyd’s of London, for that matter. I occasionally force myself to watch C-SPAN, amazed by all the legislation – and senators – which I have never heard of. I don’t have an opinion on Madonna’s latest adoption attempt. Should I? Shouldn’t I?
I feel a strange need and perhaps even a duty to know about things – to have an opinion on global warming (though my specialty is actually Russian information warfare), on whether a dog or a cat makes a better pet, on whether or not you should medicate your child, wear your baby, give birth without drugs, hold a séance and try to contact your dead relatives, invest in real estate. And at some point, I’ve read a book on all these subjects.
I imagine that Harriet is simply much more psychologically secure than I am. To my knowledge, she has never read (or reviewed) a book because Oprah told her she should, because the ladies at the pool told her she would really like it or because her pastor suggested that she should (“Getting a grip on your Anger: For Beginners and Intermediates” springs to mind). Me? Guilty on all counts, I’m afraid. I’m an inconstant reader, I’m disloyal, changing my favorite author from day to day, growing sick and weary of individuals and genres and constantly jumping ship. (“If that Jodi Picoult kills off one more character at the end of her books, that’s it! I’m over her.” And yes, I’d probably write that in a review.)
She’s also very steady. Harriet would never tell you that she “loved, loved, loved that book!!!!” with six exclamation points – anymore than she would tell you that it saved her life, or saved her marriage. Harriet never attempted to deal with her menopausal symptoms by reading a book on the subject, underlining the parts that made the most sense, and then hightailing it off to the natural foods store to stock up on black cohosh and omega fatty acids as the book suggested. (Guess who did, on the other hand? You’d be right. And no, in case you’re wondering, black cohosh doesn’t work.)
Let me be clear here. Old Harriet stays in her lane, but she’s not one of those ‘ghettoized reviewers’ – as I tend to think of them – who specializes only in one or two obscure subjects, thereby revealing more about themselves than you might otherwise know. There are the obsessed homeschoolers, the Jesus freaks, the anti-jesus freaks, the colon cleansing raw food freaks (who usually post entirely too much information about exactly what a particular diet did to their digestive tracts), the “women whose children are just so startlingly gifted that no school would ever exist that could possibly serve their needs,” the security moms who never seem to tire of reviewing and posting lists of consumer reports tracts and home safety products. No, we still know startling little aobut harriet – except that she likes historic novels.
She’s also not a basher, once again maybe a sign of her own security. She will never tell you that she hated a book, that she thinks the writer is an idiot, that maybe SOMEONE should give up writing entirely and take up a new hobby, like packaging industrial solvents. The most she’ll ever allow is that she was perhaps a tad bit uncomfortable with the historic inaccuracies in a particular piece of writing. The costumes were wrong for the period, or a bit of the dialogue left her miffed. She’s a diplomat, that Harriet.

Intro, Part Two

Here’s what the media will tell you about Harriet Klausner – retired librarian, romance novels, Western Pennsylvania, free books. But in my obsession with Harriet, I like to think I know a bit more about her. After all, if you know about someone’s reading habits, then you know quite a bit about them, right? Haven’t we all done that, browsed our bosses bookshelves in his living room at the end of the year shindig, where we were surprised to find out that he was a Wiccan, a homosexual, someone who really liked Lord of the Rings? Of course we have.
And so, based on that premise, here’s what we REALLY know about Harriet:
She thinks of books as a product, as a type of industrial good. She doesn’t think they’re magic. You probably remember at least one childhood librarian who introduced you to the Chronicles of Narnia or the fairy stories of Edward Eager and who spread her arms wide, telling you about how a book can magically transport you places. Well, that wasn’t Harriet. She of the firmly planted orthopedic shoes, standing steadily on the ground, isn’t about to soar anywhere with a book. Yes, I know that. Yes, I can tell all of that from the workmanlike way she produces her four paragraph book reviews and dutifully types them in every night. One paragraph which gives an overview of the book, one which tells what she liked about the book, one in which she compares it to other books and one in which she allows herself to be a bit critical, but not too much so.
She’s consumed with efficiency, oh she of the book a day reading and review habit, and therefore, she tends to sprinkle her reviews with advice about whether or not you want to “waste your time” with this little gem of a book, or whether “your time might be better spent” reading another book. She is not, I repeat, NOT transported anywhere through her reading of the books.
She also doesn’t expect a book to rescue her. She doesn’t read self-help books. She doesn’t read books about how to improve your diet, how to lose weight, how to dress more attractively or how to improve your marriage (or your sex life). She doesn’t need Stacey or Clint to tell her what to wear. Nor does she need Suzie Orman to tell her how to manage her money, or Martha Stewart to tell her what color to paint her walls. She clearly doesn’t need Dr. Phil. Maybe she’s just extremely secure – Maybe her husband really loves her and they have a great marriage, as she sits in her big, comfy chair next to the window reading romance novels, and he putters around the house fixing things and tightening things. Or maybe she’s just not a talker, but more of a reader. Busy reading, she seldom has time to follow him around the house or to stand in the kitchen giving him the third degree about the girl in the yellow tank top that he glanced at just a little too long the last time they were in the supermarket. Whatever the case, harriet doesn’t seek and she doesn’t find. She doesn’t seem to think that books are a key to anything – and is not engaged in that eternal scavenger hunt for enlightenment that I, for one, thought all readers were prisoner to.
Harriet plays her cards close to the chest. I’ve noticed, as a connoisseur of Amazon.com reviews, that many people feel compelled to personalize their reviews, telling you things about themselves in the course of reviewing the book. There’s Bob, who bought a guidebook to Florida, but feels honor bound to tell you that he’s “only going there on business for three days so I didn’t expect to use all the sections of the book.” However, later in the review, Bob tells us how he was pleasantly surprised that Orlando was both less dirty and less expensive than he expected and that as a result he may just give in to his wife (Joanna)’s pleading and take her and the two children to Disney for spring break, despite it being “a little pricey” for their budget.
And if you really want self-revelation in your book reviews, check out those reviews for books that will save your marriage, or books on dealing with various illnesses. It’s all there – the woman who was manic depressive for twenty years, but tahnks to a new “raw diet” and lots of nutritional supplements, she’s no longer so crazy that her kids won’t come see her. “Your book saved my life,” she writes. “Your book saved my marriage,” writes a housewife from Akron, Ohio. And if you’re feeling brave enough, you might want to visit the reviews for personal care items, since there’s one where a guy goes on in excruciating detail about the effectiveness of a certain razor for grooming his, er, private parts. “My girlfriend really likes this,” he tells us. That we did not need to know.
I picture Harriet recoiling in shock. Harriet would never tell you WHY she bought a guidebook, nor how she used it. She’s too reserved for that. Furthermore, in addition to having neither marital nor financial angst, Harriet also appears not to travel much. Sometimes I think that my obsession with harriet has to do with the fact that she’s so damned content! She’s not looking for anything in her books, other than a good read. She’s all mind, that girl, cerebral Harriet. She doesn’t have a problem with her own mind-body duality. She knows exactly who she is.
And she’s incredibly secure. She doesn’t want to fix herself, and she apparently doesn’t want to expand her horizons too much. She knows what she likes to read and seldom challenges herself with something obscure, like a novel by someone from Pakistan, for example. I assume she’s a solitary reader, and not a book clubber. Book clubbers tend to find themselves reading (and frequently reviewing) books that take them way outside their comfort zones. “I never expected to like clan of the Cave Bear,” they write, eschewing all things Neanderthal as they do, “but yet I did. It reminded me of Judith Kranz.” You won’t ever find old Harriet writing a sentence like that.
Harriet also doesn’t feel compelled to enhance her credentials and work them into her reviews, like some reviewers do. (“I’ve been a certified public accountant for twenty years and this is the best tax preparation guide on the market.”) No, Harriet may tell you that she’s an avid reader, but other than that she reveals little of herself, despite the fact that she has published several thousand reviews.
In the words of my husband, Harriet stays in her lane. And he’d describe this as a good thing. She knows who she is and what she wants and doesn’t apologize for it. She doesn’t seek to broaden her horizons or expand her thinking. She doesn’t read to challenge herself, because she already knows that she’s right. She reminds me of that odd roommate I once had in graduate school who said to me one day out of the blue, “I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to go abroad. We have everything we need right here – in Michigan.” I’m afraid I laughed, before I realized she was serious.

Why I'm doing this

I am deeply envious of Harriet Klausner. Not exactly murderously envirous, that’s get that straight right there. You won’t see me wandering around rubbing my hands together like Lady macBeth, wondering why my husband can’t be the thane of Kawdor.
But jealous, nonetheless. That’s right. Almost every day at some point, I find myself chewing over the essential unfairness of life as I contemplate a certain retired librarian from some obscure part of Pennsylvania, who I imagine most of you have never even heard of. For those of you who did, however, immediately recognize the name, perhaps you can sympathize. Harriet (I like to call her Harriet. I feel like we’re, while not exactly friends, at least acquainted, since I see her name almost every time I log on to Amazon).
Anyway, Harriet is the number one reviewer of books at Amazon.com. That’s right. Number one. Out of hundreds of thousands of people who occasionally read a book and think that it’s either so great or so awful that they just feel compelled to log on and to pen a short review (well, sometimes a long review, but that’s another story), only Harriet, the retired librarian, has the discipline to log on day after day after day, and review book after book after book. I like to picture her, Harriet, dressed in a set of sensible slacks (she’s the type that would call them slacks, I just know she would), with her hair pulled back in one of those Alice in Wonderland type bands (the better to keep it out of her eyes while she’s reading, you know), settled in a comfortable chair somewhere in Western Pennsylvania, reading her historic novels and her romance novels, with a highlighter. In my fantasy, she wears sensible shoes and a cashmere sweater with her slacks and hairband, dressed like some kind of archetypal librarian figure. She has long thin fingers which she occasionally puts up to her face as she lets out a hardy “shhhhh” in the event anyone disturbs her reading. She takes notes on her reading, perhaps even using a rubric of some sort – so that she won’t forget important details when she pens her reviews like the names of the characters or the cities in which the action takes place. She never lies on the carpet while reading and I’m pretty certain she’s never eaten an Oreo (or two or three or four) while reading, mashing the crumbs into the spine of her brand new books from Amazon.
I picture her looking up from her romance novel or her historic novel now and again, pausing as she puts her highlighter down, and picking up her cup of warm, fragrant tea, allowing herself a moment to glance out the window at the rolling hills outside her house. In my imagination, she has some kind of really hairy dog (like a sheepdog, perhaps) who chases a ball and rolls down the hill, providing wry amusement to Harriet as she pauses, only briefly, in her never-ending quest to dominate the Amazon list.
I freely confess here that everything I know about Harriet is cribbed from an article I read in the Washington Post almost two years ago -- which described her house in Western Pennsylvania, and her career as a retired librarian. It also described her work habits and her reading habits. She reads (and reviews) one book per day, usually reading throughout the day and then posting her review in the early evening. She has two sons and a husband and now receives free books from Amazon, which is her due as the number one reviewer. She has an office, I just know she does, where she neatly stacks and organizes her books and her reviews. She prints them out and files them. The files are color-coded, at least in my mind. She has a to-do list. I just know she does.

So I've moved up a few places

Here it is Monday morning and I'll just check in quickly. Wrote one review this morning, on Ghost Map, a little book about the fellow who found the causes of cholera. It's one of my favorite teaching books in social science research methods and I'm happy to share with others why I love the book.

AND THEN I CHECKED MY STATS! I'm at number 4260 for new reviewers. That's right! I've moved up almost 600 places overnight. I am, of course, already fantasizing about what I will do once I'm in the top 3000. And here's where it gets weird. I always like to check and see who my "neighbors" are -- in this case, number 4261 and number 4259. Old 4261 has a particular fascination with Asperger's syndrome -- which I would argue is not surprising -- because I think many of use who read at this volume are probably hyperlexic, yours truly included. For all I know, everyone in the top 1000 is as we say in my neighborhood, "on the spectrum" -- a bit socially awkward, prefers abstract knowledge gained from books to social knowledge gained from people and so forth.

But here's where it gets weird. Check out old 4259. He apparently really likes romance novels -- as does his wife. Is that him? I can't decide if I find the image compelling or repulsive. But doesn't it make you want to know more about this guy? I'm just saying . .

Lone Star Statements by Matthew Baldwin - The Morning News

Should I trash a book I don't like? Or only review the ones I REALLY liked? Well, here's one approach -- trashing a famous, well known, highly regarded book that others liked -- but that you didn't, sometimes for some really silly reasons. I found this article online and thought I'd archive it for my forthcoming list of amazon.com Reviewer Don'ts.


Lone Star Statements by Matthew Baldwin - The Morning News

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Who wants to be . . . POPULAR?

POPULAR! you're gonna be popular!

i'll teach you the propper ploys,

when you talk to boys, little ways to flirt and flounce,

ooh! i'll show you what shoes to wear!

how to fix your hair!

everthing that really counts to be...

POPULAR!

i'll help you be popular!

you'll hang with the right cohorts,

you'll be good at sports,

know the slang you've got to know.

so let's start, 'cause you've got an awfully long way to go!

For those of you who don't recognize the lyrics, they're from the musical "Wicked" and it's the song sung by Glinda, AKA the Good Witch of Oz.

Anyway, I recently learned something new that SHOULD help me in my question. It comes courtesy of an e-mail on the Amazon.com website in the discussion group for "Top

Reviewers." I know I don't belong there yet since I'm not the top 1000, but folks there have been kind enough to welcome me, to give me some advice and to explain things about which I am currently clueless.

Anyway, a fellow from the discussion forum recently explained to me why you DON"T want to have "fans" on Amazon.com. (I had wondered about this when I sometimes visited others profiles and one stat which comes up is "how many fans you have." I foolishly thought having fans was a good thing, but James tells me otherwise in this post:

A fan is someone who has voted "Helpful" x times for your reviews. Amazon stops counting this IDs helpful votes forever. They are listed on the reviews but do not count. If you do not work in specific areas, fans are less of a problem. For reviews that work within specific areas, they can be a major vote loss. I have 50 fans from my Civil War reviews.
You will not know when/if you become a fan, Amazon is very careful not to tell customers they can no longer vote for a reviewer they like.
IMO, Amazon has stopped showing new fans but is still adding them and stealing votes. At one time, I was getting fans faster than votes. Amazon pulled back as reviewer's were screaming at them from all sides.

I am still amazed at how seriously many of the reviewers on Amazon take their "jobs" -- though many tell me it's just a really engrossing kind of fun hobby. It's exciting to find a whole community of people who are as interested in writing reviews as I am. On the other hand, it's a bit humbling to really how arcane and kafkaesque the reviewing system is -- and how little I know and how far I have to go!

Off to read some more . . . I'm a bit concerned that going to church and to Walmart today felt a bit like being furlowed from some sort of serial offenders program. Anyway, it's blowing and cold and raining here (highly unusual for Virginia Beach in June), so it's a great day for reading. Currently working on "the Age of the Unthinkable" by Joshua Ramo.

My stats for today, Saturday, 20

TOTAL Number of reviews written: 45
New Reviewer Rank: 4849
Classic Rank: 5855
Number of reviews written today: 2
family members ignored: None. Kind of hard to do when most of the day was spent at a blisteringly hot swim meet where I screamed myself hoarse AND GOT NO READING DONE.
Potato chips? Nada. Zip. Zilch. PRetty darned proud of that, I must say.

Points to ponder: Should I get to take time off on the weekend? If is more of a job or a quest? Presumably if it's a job it's OK to take breaks -- but if it's more like climbing Everest, then you don't really get to stop just because it's the weekend, do you?

Unfortunately, one unfortunate side effect of this regime (at this stage) is that I'm developing profound sympathy for both my husband and my middle child, both of whom CAN read but aren't exactly enamored of it. There's nothing quite like the feeling of waking up the morning, gazing at the piles of books sitting everywhere in the house and thinking "Must read. Must write reviews now." All of sudden, NOT doing that sounds very good indeed -- even when previously there was nothing quite like curling up with a good book.

I'm equally disturbed by the fact that I find myself picking up books and thinking to myself, 'How long is it? How long will it take to finish this?" -- since that sounds EXACTLY how my eleven year old talks about books. Hoping this doesn't become a permanent trait.

Also, I'm trying to be somewhat disciplined about not reading magazines and newspapers when I could be reading (and reviewing) books instead. Same for some of my favorite bloggers. Wouldn't it be a shame if at the end of this year, I knew ALOT about literature of all kinds, including pulp fiction, but was hideously informed about the rest of the world and current events?

But Does She Exist?

Let me just say from the get-go that I'm more than a little bit predisposed towards conspiracy theories. First of all, my husband comes from a long line of conspiracy theorist adherents. This is not actually as surprising as it sounds -- Both his parents were born in the Middle East where from what I understand, conspiracy theories are served to infants along with mother's milk. Nothing is really what it seems, history draws a veil, and sometimes those denying that an event happened might be more or at least equally as compelling as those arguing that it did, even if one was there to witness an event with his or her own eyes. Even now, Eric, my husband, suspects conspiracies in all sorts of situations: including how the places are alloted in kindergarten, regarding why I didn't get the job I applied for, why exactly our dog got a yicky foot fungus (SOME people would say it was planted there, if you get my drift.) Not sure exactly where he falls on the moon landing, Ted Kaczynski, Area 51 and some of those other hot button issues -- but I CAN tell you that in the early years of our marraige, we watched a heck of a lot of X Files. That's all I'm saying .

In addition, I teach social science research methods for a living, and am constantly asking my students to "interrogate" (How's THAT for a nice post-modernist word?) the data, to consider all the assumptions and to consider whether or not there's an equally plausible alternative explanation for any chain of events that they might be describing. So you say that it was disgruntled Republicans who elected Barack Obama? Well, what OTHER explanations (short of alien abduction and demonic possession) might account for this phenomenon? You get the idea. . .

So what I'm saying is that while I'm not CONVINCED by those individuals who suggest that old Harriet is actually:

• a consortium of Amazon.com employees having the last laugh on the rest of us by convincing us that somewhere there's a little old spinster in tennis shoes reading romance novels
• An evil left-wing (or right-wing, depending on your predilection) conspiracy put together by 'big government' (or 'the man') to keep the little guy down, by denying him his rightful place in the ranks of Amazon reviewers
• a project that has been outsourced to India where a group of guys all named Sanjeet and Deetwab (but going by the handles Russ and Bill) are feverishly reading books (mostly historical romance novels) -- and which will someday, somehow, somewhere result in either: their kids going to college while yours go to trade school or their actually getting your job directly

While I'm not CONVINCED by either of these somewhat plausible scenarios, I'm not UNCONVINCED either. How 'bout you?

Number 4849!!!

Today I wrote three reviews -- and made it to:
New Reviewer number 4849
Classic Reviewer number 5855.
I now have 41 reviews to my name, and 121 positive votes out of 140. I'm most excited about the review I wrote for this book about loneliness, where one voter commented that I should write a book.
The thing is, I try really hard to be myself when I review books and to insert something of myself into the reviews. In my review of the loneliness book, I confessed to my longtime fascination with self-help books, and the voyeuristic thrill I get from reading other's dirty laundry. I admitted that I hate books that recommend exercise as the cure for what ails you, and noted that I feel there are multiple ways to be lonely. I like to think that that feeling came through in my review of the loneliness book. Perhaps all the reviews put together give the reader a bit of a sense of who I am -- I hope so.
I think that we read to feel that we are not alone in the world, and for me, that's partially why I review books. I don't have a lot of close friends, and have been looking for a book club in my neighborhood for years without success. Sometimes when I read a really great book, I find myself wishing I had a friend to talk about the book with -- and in a way, reading other reader's reviews of that book helps fill that void. It's nice to know that someone felt that way about my review as well.

Daily Stats Update

Number of reviews written yesterday: 2
Number of bags of potato chips eaten: 0 (Yay me! But I had two Weight Watchers ice cream bars, so that may be a moot point)
Weight: Not saying
Reviewer ranks: 5065 in New Reviewers (in between J.L. Mould and James Ridgway)
5855 in Classic reviewers (though there are six of us with the same number. Can someone explain that?)
Number of visitors to this blog: 0
Number of family members ignored: Zero, but that's only because I made them help me clean the house.
Also, I broke my self-imposed rule of becoming a real literary critic by only reviewing books, to review the Sonic Scrubber. It's just such an awesome tool!
Trips to the library: Zero

Where to find me on amazon.com
If you're looking to follow my stats "live" online, try
this link.
Fingers crossed that it works!

Just wanted to post this interesting link to an interview with Jodi Picoult, who writes those wonderful books about people whose kids discover they have unusual gifts, develop rare diseases, engage in schoolyard violence and so forth. Here's how she sees the type of writing she does and why it matters. Enjoy!

Crafting my strategy

I've decided to give myself exactly one year to unseat Harriet. I'm borrowing that strategy from the author of "The Year of Living Biblically" and "The Know-it-All". It seems like a project of this sort should have a finite end to it, and then the story should be written, one way or the author. Also, if you've ever read the book about the "Julia-Julia Project" -- where a woman in New York (named Julia) gives herself one year to work through all of Juliet Child's recipes in 'The Art of French Cooking', you'll see that this seems to be a common theme for memoirs. I like the way that in all of these books, there's a certain tension as the deadline approaches and you're unsure whether or not the author will make it, and then he (or she) puts pedal to the metal and goes full out in their quest. (See also, "Such a Pretty Fat" in which the author attempts to get thin and beautiful in one year. Personally, I enjoyed reading it, but would be too intimidated to actually try to do it.)
So that's Decision One: The Time Frame is One Year.
Next Decision: Is it fair to review things other than books, or is it cheating to call yourself "amazon's top reviewer" if you've also reviewed vacuum cleaners, vitamins for your cat and, er, grooming aids. As always, your thoughts are appreciated. I already know what Harriet's are -- she's a pure "literary critic" -- as befits a former librarian. But, as they say on the playground, "I know you are, but what am I?"

Something interesting to note

Last evening (after I returned from the Library), I posted a review on amazon of a really neat new memoir I read. It's by Rachel Sontag and it's called "House Rules." It's her own story of growing up in a house, marriage and family that are ruled (there's no other word for it) by her dad. Her father is a really bright guy, there's no doubt about that. He's a medical school professor at Northwestern University, and some type of doctor. He's also kind of a sadist and a control freak -- from the way she tells it. Ultimately, she ends up estranged from the family and never really makes her peace with the situation. It's the story of a family that's not MANIACALLY disfunctional -- just kind of cold and emotionally abusive.

But here's the interesting part -- After Rachel Sontag published the book, her father has made a practice of logging onto Amazon.com in order to trash Rachel in print, disputing her 'intepretation' of the events, giving her negative votes and even setting up his own website to refute her take on her own childhood. In many ways, this tells a much deeper story than just reading the book alone might. Score one for Amazon. In a sense, it's not just dead pages in print -- it's a living, breathing psychodrama. Brought to you by amazon.com -- and yours truly.

The stats for Today, Thursday June 18

Number of books reviewed: 37
Trips to the Library this week: 2
Number of Pounds Gained from sitting and reading rather than exercising: Not saying
Bags of Potato chips consumed: 1
Family Members Ignored: 4 (plus a dog)
New reader ranking: 5,585
Classic reader Ranking: 5086
NEARLY IN THE TOP 5000! What should I do to celebrate?