"After earning her master's degree in library science, Klausner moved around the United States with her husband, a palm reader." (Image by Olaf Simons.)

Reviewing books on Amazon is even more ridiculous than spending time writing a blog. I don’t mean putting in a good word for a friend who’s published a book. I’m talking about people who relentlessly post reviews and ratings for thousands of books (and other products). Nicholas Jackson has an interesting piece about these obsessives in an Atlantic story titled “What Motivates Amazon’s Hardcore Readers?” A couple of excerpts about the most prolific reviewer of all, a Bronx native:

“Harriet Klausner is a speed reader. It’s a gift she was born with, according to her Amazon.com profile, where she also claims to go through two books a day. Even at that speed it would take more than 31 years to read the 22,824 novels Klausner had reviewed as of this writing. But why does she do it?

After earning her master’s degree in library science, Klausner moved around the United States with her husband, a palm reader. This, according to a personal website she maintains with a complete archive of her reviews. (Klausner didn’t respond to an interview request.) ‘I also watched my book reviewing career begin to take shape,’ she writes, noting that, with each city she moved to, she always found work with a library or bookstore. ‘I take immense pleasure informing other readers about newcomers or unknown authors who have written superb novels.’

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It’s even been suggested that Klausner doesn’t exist, or that the profile exists as a means of self promotion for publishers. But “Our Lady of the Infinite Reviews” has been profiled everywhere from Wired to Time, where Lev Grossman wrote that ‘online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can’t match.'”