REVIEWS OF REVIEWS OF REVIEWS? Michael Malone emails:

I’m enjoying the hell out of watching you cover the reviews of your own book (including mine). I’m curious: is this a first? Has any author ever before reviewed his reviewers in real time? Care to share with us your feelings about this as you go along? As the author or co-author of a dozen books (and 60K words into my new one) I’ve experienced every possible human emotion reading reviews of my books – from sheer shouting elation to hiding under a blanket with a bottle. How do [you] stay so restrained?

I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve really been reviewing the reviewers — my response to Malone’s review was more a self-criticism — but that’s interesting. I rather doubt that anyone wants to hear the whole experience in first-person anyway. Now I’m not terribly happy with the trolls posting Amazon reviews that call the book “right wing trash” and the like, as they’ve pretty clearly not read the book — or even the positive blurbs from those notorious righties Joe Trippi and Arianna Huffington — but that sort of thing is par for the course nowadays, alas.

UPDATE: Hey, there’s more from Arianna here (“You know Reynolds has hit on something when John Podhoretz and I agree that ‘Army of Davids’ is a must-read.”) though the commenter on her blog who thinks I have aspirations to be a political candidate is sadly misinformed. That’s kind of like the occasional emailers I get who think I’m angling for a federal judgeship. Anyone who reads InstaPundit regularly should know that I’m neither interested in — nor in the slightest degree viable as — either one. Which is just as well for me, and, no doubt, for the country. And I’d probably have to give up the blog, which makes it a nonstarter anyway.

Now there’s a slogan: “Keep Glenn blogging. Right for Glenn — Right for America!”

Well, it’s a better slogan than this one!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, Michael, here’s one from Joel Johnson at Gizmodo:

I’m glad I didn’t skip the parts about blogging and citizen media, though, in large part because Reynolds discusses a lot of blogs in the political sphere that I just don’t have much familiarity with. And as much as we tech bloggers like to toot our horns about breaking hot gadget news, there’s no question that the work of people like J.D. Johannes—who is telling the story of a single platoon of Marines on a shoestring budget using cheap, modern tech—is immeasurably more important than any given iPod rumor. . . .

Anyway, this is a weak endorsement—I haven’t even finished the damn thing—but as someone who makes his living operating blogs that sit literally on the intersection of corporate and citizens’ media, An Army of Davids has already given me a lot to think about.

If I can tell Joel Johnson anything new, I’m pretty happy.

STILL MORE: Hmm. I never thought of it this way: “An Army of Davids is a romantic book.”

Though one guy told me he read it out loud to his wife in the hot tub.