Meta – Wis[s]e Words

pile of books

You may know that apart from this blog, I also got a booklog. A while back I made a bet with myself, to review 25 books in 25 days. I did this because I had quite a backlog of unfinished and half finished reviews waiting to be completed and put on the site and the white spots on the booklog were getting embarassing… I started on May 20th and it is now June 13rd and I’ve just completed my 25th review, so I thought I’d present them to you, my adoring public, now:

13-06-2005: added Goodbye to All That: Robert Graves
12-06-2005: added Nine Layers of Sky: Liz Williams
11-06-2005: added The Motion of Light in Water: Samuel Delany
10-06-2005: added The Eyre Affair: Jasper Fforde
09-06-2005: added Finity: John Barnes
08-06-2005: added A Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf
07-06-2005: added The Mediterranean Vol. 1: Fernand Braudel
06-06-2005: added The Best Democracy Money can Buy: Greg Palast
05-06-2005: added The Truth: Terry Pratchett
04-06-2005: added Boiling a Frog: Christopher Brookmyre
03-06-2005: added Age of Extremes: Eric Hobsbawm
02-06-2005: added Snowball Earth: Gabrielle Walker
01-06-2005: added The Demon in the Freezer: Richard Preston
31-05-2005: added All the Colours of Darkness: Lloyd Biggle, Jr
30-05-2005: added Shadow of the Torturer: Gene Wolfe
29-05-2005: added The Land Leviathan: Michael Moorcock
28-05-2005: added Karl Marx: A Life: Francis Wheen
27-05-2005: added Put a Lid on it: Donald E. Westlake
26-05-2005: added Guardians of Time: Poul Anderson
25-05-2005: added Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: H. Beam Piper
24-05-2005: added Hogfather: Terry Pratchett
23-05-2005: added The Documents in the Case: Dorothy Sayers
22-05-2005: added A Murder of Quality: John Le Carré
21-05-2005: added Revolt in 2100: Robert A. Heinlein
20-05-2005: added The Universe Between: Alan E. Nourse

There you go, 25 reviews of books of varying qualities and genres: “voor elck wat wils” and for you to exclaim about, praise or mock me over. It’s been fun, if somewhat wearing.

This week, Shelley of Burningbird has been blogging for two years. To commemorate this, she provided a little history of her blog, doing the usual musing one does at those events, in the course of which she wrote this:

Remember Tubby the Cat? The quizzes? Googlewhacking? Those were the days, weren’t they? All of a sudden now, weblogging is News. Capital ‘N’ news. Serious stuff.

For instance, NBC news just had a story tonight on warblogs. They did a Google search on the term ‘warblog’ and mentioned that over 300,000 entries show up. They showed the Google results, and PapaScott, you showed up in the results! Did you know you were on national US TV tonight?

Before it was cats. Now it’s war. I’m not sure this is an improvement. The intimate little party, the golden age when we could write unemcumbered by the real world is over. Knock, knock. The world wants in.

I can understand where Shelley’s coming from, but I think she’s wrong here. Has it ever been possible to “write unemcumbered by the real world”, without shutting your eyes to it? I never had this golden age, as the weblogs I followed from the beginning were all too involved with the real world of politics and war, as my own are too. What’s happening now is not new; though it is certainly more pervasive.

Apart from that, happy anniversary, Burningbird and I wish I had known you earlier.

Articles with the Tag Meta

25 books in 25 days

Keep on blogging in the real world