you show me your book review, i'll show you...

Tito Perez offers the best take yet on the thumbnail review of your city's book review, which all started with Mark Sarvas and his weekly takes on the LA Times Book Review: he dissects his thumb.*

I briefly considered reviewing my local paper's Sunday Book Page, which consists of best-seller lists, what's new at the library adn random local press reviews or (mostly) canned national reprints of reviews -- just so you could appreciate what life is like for us poor souls who are only moved to holler and seethe by the book coverage in papers outside the major cities, who would love to have a book review to critique. It already IS a thumbnail, a thumbnail of inferior coverage from larger media outlets. But it would really be more effort than it's worth.

Suffice to say that the paper's new book club has only picked one fiction title out of its first four so far, and it looks TERRIBLE. (Eye of the beholder, but soft focus dissection of a family doesn't cut it, not to mention it has a blurb from Robert freaking Morgan.)

*Well, not literally dissects. That would be gross.