Opening the curtains

It's been a few months.

Originally, this blog came out of a new-yearish resolution to write a review of every book I read all the way through. The point of that resolution was both to catalog what I read and what I thought of it for the inevitably forgetful Future Me, and also to try and hone some type of skill as an off-the-cuff reviewer and essayist. Every review on the blog thus far was written in one draft--for good or ill, I can't say. This went well up until the end of February (as you can see) and perished in the tide of qualifying exams, as every sort of leisure activity got pushed to the periphery. (Qualifying exams for my department are like a three-hour oral exam and presentation about a proposed direction of research for the PhD. They are the subject of more worry and preparation than they're worth, but they do tend to force everyone to get their thinking in order.) I passed, of course, and then saw a folder on my desktop containing my backlog: the titles of the three books I had read during those months of preparation. And I didn't really want to write about any of them; though they weren't terrible books, I had picked them up to distract myself on the elliptical machine, and hadn't retained any lingering thoughts or angles on them. I could summarize the plot or outline, but didn't have many worthy opinions on the content, which had been an ongoing reviewing problem: what about the books that were only so-so? How could they make an interesting review? (And isn't no review at all the most damning?)

So, I'm changing the rules a bit. I'm no longer going to review every book I read, only those that make an impression. This means I probably won't have a comprehensive list of what I read, and Future Me will have to forgo it. I also may take longer with the reviews, to work on, well, editing my own work, on which I need more deliberate practice. I also intend to wax a little more autobiographical, because although I previously had faith in the functions of google to bring readers to reviews for books they were researching, I really have no readers, so there's no harm in writing to myself.

And so on.