I don’t write about every book I read, any more—I sort of wish I did, or rather I sort of wish that I had written about them without wanting to go through the actual writing. It was terrific to have a list at the end of the year, and also to have a record after five or six years. I have often gone back to this Tohu Bohu to remind myself what I thought of a book, or even if I had read it at all. It’s a terrific record of five years or so of my reading.
On the other hand, I found it a chore to actually do, and I didn’t enjoy writing the reports very much. Or most of them, anyway. They did not spark conversations (back in the days when there were conversations occasionally sparked here) and they crowded out other potential posts. Well, they felt like they did, anyway; it’s probably far more accurate that fulfilling my promise to myself to blog each and every book kept me in the habit of posting nearly daily, and when I stopped with the bookblogging, I pretty much stopped with the blogging. Well, anyway, I am going to attempt to write more often about books that I read, even if I don’t return to the commitment to blog ’em all.
One book I read recently was John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire. I’ve written a lot about Mr. Scalzi’s work here; I have used phrases like like basically competent and a safe bet and perfectly good and even enjoyed quite a bit but also not really that great. Wow. It seems that I have spent a fair amount of pixels trying to explain myself, too: why I keep reading them, or why I am fond of them, and also why I don’t love them. It’s frankly peculiar, taken in the aggregate and all. Thousands of words. Mine, I mean. Many thousands of his.
And the thing is, I feel pretty much the same about this one as I felt about the others. It’s fun, but it’s not terribly powerful, and it isn’t so fun that I want to gleefully return to it. There are few Sources of Reader Irritation—although there is one huge one for me, which is that it was obvious quite early on that the book (or Book One) would end without resolving anything important.
Come to think of it, this was probably not a good one to start me bookblogging again.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.