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The theme this time around was publishing, so we decided to include reviews of self-published books by local writers. I assigned a bunch and set a deadline. Now here’s the strange thing: over the following couple weeks, staffers who’d agreed to review a book kept showing up at my office door to express their anguish (anguish!) over what I’d given them to read. A few brought the book with them so they could give me a verbatim catalog of horrible grammar, laughable typos, stupid verbal tics, egregious inconsistencies, and ridiculous turns of phrase. Others came empty-handed, evidently so that they could massage their aching temples as they demanded to know what they were supposed to do with crap like this. There were multiple e-mail exchanges on the subject. “Are we still to review books if we greatly dislike them?” asked one staffer with a sweet diffidence. “I will, but I feel a little bad about bagging on a guy who put all this effort into self-publishing his novel.”
