Category: Blogging

Thinking of doing a refresh for 2011

Last year I looked at the blog and changed the look and to a limited extent the content and thoughts are now turning to doing something smiliar.

The look is perhaps a little bit dull and the commitment to try and update every day has just not been sustainable this year and so going forward I will be being more realistic about the volume of posts.

What is important are the reviews and so more effort will be put into those. There are still so many that are not yet done from this year and to speed up the process I will be putting together some concise reviews in the next few days to clear the backlog.

Thanks as ever for reading and if you have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to make them.

A fourth birthday

Today marks the fourth birthday of this blog. It all started four years ago after a conversation the night before with my brother who told me that rather than write things down in little notebooks I could put my thoughts and reviews of books online.

It’s been a great four years with lots of reading packed in and it’s also provided an opportunity to interact with a wider book reading and literature loving group of people, most of whom are in the blog roll on the right. It’s been fun, hard work and occasionally let’s be truthful a bit of a chore. The mojo has risen and dipped but is hovering on okay at the moment.

Thanks for reading and supporting the blog over the last four years.

Reading and writing

Years ago I was told an anecdote about a journalist on the Daily Telegraph who was asked by his editor “have you read the story?” to which the hack replied “I can either write for this paper or read it, which would you prefer?”

Feeling a bit like that at the moment as I’m head down concentrating on the reading and sure enough when you let the reviews slide a bit the reading you are able to do seems to speed up a little bit.

But I’m all too aware that the days slip by without a post and more importantly that pile of books that need to be reviewed just gets longer. So after the next book, this is a mantra coming up, I intend to sit down and do some reviews. Just one more book and then things should get going 😉

Doing things slightly differently

For the past three and a half years the approach has been to blog about books I’m reading on a daily basis. Great for me to remind myself what they are all about but not so interesting for those that simply want to see what i have read and thought about it. As a result the approach this year will be to do a half way through blog post and then a concluding review.

It makes more sense to summarise the progess of a book at the half way stage and then to produce a review at the end rather than a daily diary with potentially a big pause before the review appears.

I am concious that I am still working through a backlog of reviews of books read last year. I will try to get those up in the next few weeks sprinkled in among other more current reading.

maybe time for a refresh?

The look and feel of the blog hasn’t changed for a couple of years and I’m thinking that maybe it’s time to have a look at what the options are for improving the look and feel of it. The dots seemed to be one of the best choices available at the time but Blogger has probably improved the choices since then and made it easier to make things look more compelling.

Keep an eye on the blog in the next few weeks to see if I have the guts and the gumption to make any changes. I’d like to but we will see.

The addictive nature of Twitter

i started Twitter in earnest a couple of weeks ago – name is insidebooks on there as well – and am finding it addictive. The main reason is that not only does it provoke you to condense your thoughts but it is also more socialble and interactive than blogging.

As a result my attitude towards blogging is becoming more strained and that is something to keep an eye on. Micro blogging might be seen by some as a cop out, because of the 140 character limit. But in fact I am communicating more often and more widely on that medium.

Still for the foreseable future both this and Twitter will be kept going to offer a best (or worst) of both worlds.

Fair criticism

Somebody recently commented on one of the reviews I posted up a while ago pointing out that I was pretty much an ignoramus. At first the criticism hurt but then it got me thinking and in a way I have to agree.

The more you read hopefully makes you a better reader. By that what I mean is that literary references and style aping that might be included in a work pass you by if you don’t have the wider knowledge needed to pick up on them. For instance when I started to read Ulysses someone pointed out that without a knowledge of the Odyssey it was going to have points that just sailed over my head. Have to admit that even with Homer under the belt the references were still pretty hard to spot.

So that is the first line of defence, but the second is that reading is subjective and also meant to be enjoyable. That last point is crucial. I know that by blogging thoughts on books you sort of put yourself out there but that believe it or not is still part of the enjoyment.

Hopefully the point is made that even in terse criticism there is some food for thought and give it time (a decade or two more) and a lot more reading and my reviews actually might become better…

More fuel for the bloggers v. critics debate

Just before I left to head off to work this morning there was a discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme (it happened at 8.20 and you can listen to it online) about the differences between literary bloggers and traditional critics. This is a long running debate but the latest attempt to ignite the war of words failed mainly because the blogging representative from ReadySteadyBook.com was almost as qualified as the academic reviewer.

Of course there are people blogging with axes to grind and idiotic views to share. But unless you take everything you read completely on trust there is always the option to go elsewhere. The ability to share a gut reaction to a book is very powerful in some cases because it is raw analysis. Obviously being able to put it into a literary context is helpful but there is this is not an either or debate there is a place for both approaches.

As a blogger one of the things I have wrestled with is a feeling that more time needs to be spent producing long essay length posts about literature. The reason finally for deciding not to do those is not just because of time, and possibly a certain amount of talent lacking, but primarily because writing those type of posts never motivated me to start blogging in the first place.

Broadly there seem to be two types of blogs: those that are written for personal reasons – for instance just sharing the joy of books and reading – and those that are written with a firm eye on the commercial opportunities and traffic stats.

Maybe the problems occur in the first category but that’s where myself and lots of other fantastic bloggers are happy existing.