In the thick of an assigning, an LJ Book Review editor will sort through several dozen stacks of manuscripts and galleys (bound, often cleaner manuscripts that resemble trade paperbacks). The sheer volume of submissions—1000 a week last I heard—more often exhausts than exhilirates. Not helping the situation is the ever shrinking amount of time set aside for assigning. Like lots of other people in 21st-century corporate America, book review editors have had to take on more administrative duties and work double time to generate web-specific content. While our colleagues at PublisherWeekly can be spied reading at their desks (my brown eyes have turned permanently green with envy), we LJ workhorses must manhandle and skim galleys and press materials—there are simply too many bloody books and not enough bloody time. I say this not to complain but to clue curious readers into our workflow.

When I tell people what I do for a living, most still respond with something along the lines of, “So you get to read all day? You lucky, girl, you!” I quickly shatter those assumptions of gentlewomanly glamour. On any given Tuesday, you will not find me in a tweed Brooks Brothers pencil skirt and white button-up cozying up to my desk lamp with Cormac McCarthy’s latest. Chances are, I’m editing, copyediting, emailing, and blog brainstorming all at the same time in Gap khakis and a T-shirt/cardigan combo. Meanwhile, I have to wonder, “What’s it like for the Big Guns at the New York Times? Do they have the luxury of reading, even rereading on the clock?”

While I had the pleasure of meeting a Times managing editor at a BookExpo America event two years ago, before I could pick her brain, a swarm of publicists descended on her. For clues, I am then left to read the New York Times Book Review, something I may do four times a year. This past Sunday, I read the cover piece on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the composite review of Donald Spoto’s Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn and William J. Mann’s Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn. These books have either September or October pub dates, so it does appear, at least in these cases, that the Times editors are not very rushed. My impression is that they rarely review books before they come out, which blows my mind. LJ, like most of the other book trades, is in the prepublication review business. We want to mint our word before anyone else so librarians know what’s worth purchasing. That the Times would rather come in last is somehow gratifying. They’ve got pedigree up the masthead, but we’ve got crazy workflow and a hunger to communicate fast.