Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more