(Lev Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays. Subscribe to his RSS feed.) My career as a book reviewer started with a cold call. The year before, I had dropped out of graduate school rather than inflict another dissertation about Joyce and Woolf on the world. And I didn’t regret that – I don’ t think anybody will ever, ever regret that – but I did miss writing about books. Maybe, it occurred to me, if I wasn’t writing a dissertation, I could just inflict a few book reviews on the world instead. What’s the worst that could happen. So I bought a copy of Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine that publishes a very large number of very short reviews, and called their offices, and asked for the reviews editor. This was 1997, which was probably the last moment in history when you could do something like that and not come off as completely obnoxious or insane. I had a wildly awkward conversation with the reviews editor, who was a very, very patient person, and by the end of it she’d agreed to give me a try-out. I felt like I’d won the lottery. I hadn’t. Not yet anyway. (READ: Beyond Good and Awful: Literary Value in the Age of the Amazon Review) I didn’t quit my day job. But I did spend two years reviewing for Publishers Weekly, then three more years freelancing for other magazines before I started reviewing for TIME. I may be the only person besides Steve Case who benefited from the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, in the aftermath of which TIME offered retirement packages to some of its senior staff, including the late, great Paul Gray, who had been the book critic here for decades. They hired me to do his job, and a few other people’s jobs too, for less than any of those people were making. That was when I won the lottery. At any rate I was a hell of a lot luckier than George Orwell, who had this to say about book reviewing in “Confessions of … Continue reading Confessions of (Another) Book Reviewer