Saturday, June 13, 2015

Taking stock

Here I am, nearly halfway through 2015, and from the looks of this blog, it's been a practically
illiterate six months.

That's only a partial truth. As editing work flows in from the internet at a steady pace, I've been spending four to ten hours a day at the computer. Sometimes I'm proofreading -- adjusting punctuation and usage -- and at other times I'm rewriting. When I'm done, though, the last thing I feel like doing is spending another hour or more staring at the screen and tapping away on the keyboard, composing a blog post.

My eyes are often fatigued at the end of a day, but I'm still hungry to read excellent writing that I don't feel obliged to fix. I have been reading these past months, albeit not as much as before. I just haven't been keeping up with the blog posts, which are my reader's journal entries, and that disturbs me. I started Bookface because I had been consuming books like snacks, gobbling them too hastily, getting too little nutritional value from them and retaining even less. Writing about each book helps me to read more thoughtfully, and recording excerpts helps me to remember and appreciate more fully what I've read.

Not only has this gap highlighted the value of the blog, it's also pointed out the value of the Kindle. As I looked over the Table of Contents this afternoon, I could tally the books I've read over the past six months, and the excerpts and notes are tidily stored in one file, just waiting to be blogged about.

The next few entries may be brief, poorly organised and error-prone (horrors!), but better an imperfect record than none.


1 comment:

  1. I hope the both of us find many opportunities to continue reading for pleasure. Finding the time to read can be a challenge, esp if we spend much of our day reading off a screen. At the end of the day, I just want to give my eyes a break. Which is why I now turn to audiobooks, which are brilliant for my dyslexia and which help me learn the correct way to pronounce words and names.

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