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An experiment

I have been going over the blog entries for the last several months with a mind to doing something new. Not just to change things for the sake of change but to change for the sake of making the blog more interesting, for me and for the handful of readers who visit it. There are three things I would like to try and I will have to see if I have the stamina for it because it calls for more frequent posting and some scanning and image editing on my part.

  • The first thing is to include more reading journal entries, i.e. comments on books I am in the process of reading.
  • The second is to write something about each and every book I finish. I don't think I will have the stamina to review them all, but I want to try to mention each book. This might include posting the opening sentences or passages of all the books I read and any interesting passages that have caught my attention, made me laugh, made me stop and think, or impressed me in some other way, but I'm making no promises about that.
  • The third thing is to resurrect an old feature: the cover analysis and criticism. This time around I plan not only to snark bad covers, but also to discuss good cover design, and, should I come across different covers of the same book, to compare them (like I did in this post).

It remains to be seen how long I can keep it up - I tend to blog in cycles, so that for a while I am posting every day, and then there will be stretches of days or even weeks when I am simply not interested in posting anything at all (in one case more than a year passed without a post, although not on this particular blog).

This is, besides an attempt to make the blog more interesting, also part of an attempt to pull myself out of a descent back into depression that is just beginning. The symptoms are all there: the disinterest in reading, being bored by everything, the avoidance of human contact, the increased appetite, the feeling of fatigue when I know I'm not tired, and the increased need for sleep. I have learned to fight this by various means, and making changes, however small they may be, is one of them.

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