In Which Our Heroine Reviews Another Book
As some of you know, I review legal books from time to time for the Bi-Monthly Review of Law Books. This is a sweet deal for me, in that I get free books that I pick to read (I have to get them approved first) and then I have to actually read them and digest whether or not they are any good. Generally, by the time I want to read them, they have been through enough editing, etc that they are actually worth reading. I might not like it, but they still might be worth reading.

This also makes me one of the few people in the world who reads 1, 000 pages treatises on legal topics from cover to cover. Treatises are not designed to be interesting, but rather authoritative and comprehensive. Consequently, I tend to read my books in pairs. One treatise type thing, which will make me the Clifford Claven of the IP law set (last go around 2,000 pages on Intellectual Property Crime, this time 1,500 on International Domain Name Law), and a more popular culture type book to read a bit more like a novel. These can be quite enjoyable.

Not this time. This time Bozo here picked Pat Choate's "Hot Property". I now feel on a vengeful mission from God not to let people read this book. It is just that bad. It is not just that I disagree with Choate's politics. That was always going to be a given, but I figured he might have something worth saying. I was very wrong on that front.

This then presented an interesting challenge. How can something that is so woeful that by the fourth page of the introduction you know you're going to have trouble not mumbling under your breath constantly while you are reading it have a review written about it that is more constructive than "This sucks rocks. Purchase at your peril."? This actually provides the impetus for finishing it. I had to actually compile why it was so bad. I had to sum up the bad research, the blindly unanalysed "America is number one" stance (we might be, but not by just saying it. You've got to back that assertion up!), and the fact that the man doesn't know what he is talking about and put it into words. Turns out that if you have to read the book, putting it into words is better than any therapy you might ever have to do for reading it. If only they had told us this when we had to write Book Reports in school!
Thankfully, I have done well enough to a) be put as the lead review this edition, and b) get asked to edit the others. Huzzah for me!

Love,
Anne