Sunday, August 13, 2017

Starting and Finishing

I'm announcing a new blogging project.

From now on, in addition to my regular book reviews, I'm going to be posting to announce when I start reading a book, and when I finish reading it.

The reasons for this are pure self-indulgence.
I just want to post more about what I'm reading.

Up until now, I've been saving up all my thoughts for one massive book review at the end.  But I'm usually most enthusiastic about a book right when I start reading it.  And so I want to start sharing the beginning of new reading projects as well.

Also, I get an enormous sense of self-satisfaction when I get to the end of a book.  However, since it often takes me days, weeks, months (or in some rare cases even over a year) to sort my thoughts out for a review, I often have to delay my satisfaction of announcing that I've completed another book until the review is written.
Under this new system, I'm going to reward myself for finishing the book with a little mini-announcement before I get down to writing the review.

There's a couple of additional considerations.

Some books I don't really read straight through, but instead will slowly nibble at them.  In these cases, it can take me several months, or even over a year to complete a book.  By which point, when I write the review, the beginning of the book has faded in my memory, and I'm really only reviewing the last half of it.
This added feature will help with the transparency in such cases.  People can see the dates of when I've started a book and when I've finished, and adjust their expectations of my review accordingly.  (Although admittedly, I'm probably the only one losing any sleep over this.)

I'm going to start doing this moving forward.  Books I'm already currently reading won't get a starting announcement, but I'll announce when I finish them.

There are a couple books I've already finished, and am currently trying to write reviews for, but those will also get skipped over.  Only books I finish from this date forward will get announced.

Link of the Day
Professor Noam Chomsky August 13, 2017 - Brexit Annual Guest Lecture With Noam Chomsky

Playlist HERE:

2 comments:

dpreimer said...

Ah, the Nick Hornby approach. Good luck with that.

Joel Swagman said...

Actually to be perfectly honest, "books bought" would be yet another category.

Probably half (or more?) of the books I buy I never get around to even starting.

So I guess really there should be 3 categories:

Books bought,
Books actually started,
and Books finished.

(Actually, now you've got me thinking. Maybe I should do 3 categories....)