RogerBW's Blog

On 9 January 2014 I made my first post to this blog.

There has been at least one post here each day since. Well done me!

Total word count is over a quarter of a million; I could have written a great fat book instead. (But as many readers have found out, I'm interested in lots of different things, so it might not have been a terribly coherent book.)

I've also rewritten the blog engine from scratch (markdown is now supported in comments, by the way), and put together various support software to keep posts on the same topic from going up too close together. (Since about a third of the posts are book reviews, I try to keep them spaced out between other things.)

I'm not making any resolutions, but I will continue to try to post something every day until I get bored with it.

When I started this I suppose I expected it to last for a few months at a daily posting rate, but then I started to write book reviews, largely in a quest for content that I could put together reasonably quickly. This hasn't led to my reading any more books than before (130 in a year is on the low end of normal for me), but it has led to a substantial difference in the way I think about them as I'm reading them, and of course I'm contemplating them again afterwards as I write the review even if it's one I dash off relatively quickly. (The same applies to a lesser extent to film, television and anime; I think it's a general "reviewer mentality".)

What really surprised me was how many books I'd finish in a vaguely positive mood, but come to dislike when I was putting together the review, when I thought about the things the author got wrong; in television and film I believe this is called "refrigerator logic". I expect less of those media so I don't complain as much; but books should be written well. (Yes, I have libriolatrous tendencies. I don't like to see books destroyed, even if they're Battlefield Earth which nobody should read ever.) Still, it's not as if I'm enjoying them any less while I'm reading, even if I'm now less likely to read them again in a few years' time.