I'm taking this moment to post for the first time not about books, but about my philosophy of blogging. I want to try to make sense, for you and for me, of what it is this project is all about.
This blog is not for reviews, though many of the posts contain editorial review type comments. It's for first thoughts. It's for my immediate impressions, my reactions, what I'm thinking about immediately after finishing (a book or a section). As such, the writing is far from polished, and is far from trying to argue a specific idea or point.
I'm casting a net with these pages. I'm publicly saying, I'm here and I've read this piece. I'm willing to think about the piece, and I'm willing to talk about it--by offering some initial thoughts, and by inviting comments that might lead to more interesting discussions. A quick glance through the history of the comments will convince you that discussions are virutally non-existant, but the second reason to have the comments--an opportunity for people to reccomend other pieces to me has indeed borne some fruit.
The blog gives me an excuse to write about books, and forces me to be slightly more intentional about what I do read. It's a place to stop the reading, and to begin to reflect about the reading.
I've enjoyed my first year here; maybe by next year, I'll have finished reading the book I had just started a year ago (I'm not as far into it as I might like).
One year ago:
So far today:
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
- I'm in the middle of chapter two.
- It's amazing how interesting STC's footnotes are.
I find that I get lost in their arguments.
By the time I'm done reading one, I've forgotten what he
was discussing before I jumped to the footnote.
