I did the thing nobody ever does on @jstor and filtered for book reviews. Yeah, that's right, FOR book reviews.
Am I not also the kind of person who gets all excited when they see an interesting title in their search and then deflate when they find out it's just a review?
Of course I am.
But here's a fun little tip: If you're wondering what sort of publications have appeared in your field of study recently (because you might just be thinking about pursuing some postdoc research after all), filtering for book reviews from the past two or three years will give you a pretty neat collection to check out.
No, I did not actually read those reviews; I went straight over to libgen and got the books. Except for one, which libgen didn't have. There, I had to read the review. But: not as useless as you might think, since the review had some nice citations for books I could download instead.
Book reviews. Not as shitty as you think.