I was talking to someone about my various reviewing gigs, and she mentioned that freelance work like that sounds like a dream job for someone who loves reading. That’s true to a certain extent, but at times it can also be somewhat of a nightmare.

See, the thing is, most reviewers are assigned certain books to review, and so you have to read and review it no matter what. If you absolutely hate the book, you have to finish reading it, and then write a negative review. Doing this can be cathartic to the reviewer, since the author made him suffer through such a dreadful book. But that doesn’t really make amends for the fact that several hours of the reviewer’s life have been wasted reading the dreck in question, and suffering through those hours can be exquisite agony.

On the other hand, of course, it’s always nice to be paid to read something you would have read anyway, and it’s always a nice surprise to read and really enjoy something you wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. That’s happened to me a couple times already since I started reviewing regularly, and for that I’m grateful.

In any case, the primary reason for my unplanned blog vacation has been that I’ve had to devote nearly all of my free time to getting my reading done, and reading bad books seems to take much longer than reading good ones. I’ve been reviewing two books per week for Kirkus, and that’s become too much, so I’m going to scale back to one per week. That should make reading–even the bad books–much easier to accomplish without devoting all my time to it.