Reading Locus online, I saw a link to January magazine's review. http://www.januarymagazine.com/SFF/americangods.html is the kind of book review I like as an author -- not because it liked the book (although it did) but because the book I read about in the review was the same one I thought I was writing. And so many of the reviews and comments that come over the transom, some of them enthusiastic and some of them damning, are reviews of books that I don't remember writing at all.
... which reminds me. Who was it defined a novel as "a long piece of prose with something wrong with it"?
A friend said to me recently, shocked, "You don't read your reviews do you?" and I had to admit that, sure I do. I don't pay much attention to them -- I always liked Kingsley Amis's comment on bad reviews that "they might spoil my breakfast, but they don"t spoil my lunch" -- other than to do a sort of tally of how many good to bad we're getting, and to see which ones actually seem to sell books.