A note on the reactivation of my blog

In the early days of my blog, I was aiming for one book-related post per week, and later to at least one per two weeks, and I would occasionally split a post into two or more parts to make it last longer. One of the main reasons why I eventually gave up posting was that I realized I could no longer maintain that sort of schedule.

Part of the reason for my efforts to post regularly was the idea that the blog did, after all, have a few people that I optimistically thought of as ‘regular readers’, and whom I did not want to disappoint by not having something new at least once per week or two. Even back then, I suspect that any such regular readers were outnumbered by those more random ones who were brought here by search engines.

By now, after a hiatus of almost six years, there are surely no regular readers who could be disappointed, and as a result I felt comfortable deciding that I'd try posting again; but without pretending to commit to any sort of regular schedule. I'll simply post new book-related posts if and when I have something ready. Some of the next few posts will be things I've written (about books I had read) over the past few years, while my blog was on hiatus, while others will be about books I've read recently or which I'm reading now.

In any case, the main audience that I've always had in mind when writing these posts remains the same as before — namely myself.

*

I thought I'd take this opportunity to try clearing up a bit of a misconception that seems to underly some of the comments under my posts. Some people think of my blog posts as book reviews, and then unsurprisingly find them very bad. Now admittedly, my posts do in some superficial outside ways resemble book reviews, but really they aren't meant to be anything of the sort.

I'm just a random nobody, without any particular skill or education that would make me competent to review books; I read various books that I am, for various reasons, at least vaguely interested in, and in some cases this includes books that I really shouldn't be reading as I'm definitely not part of their intended target audience; and be that as it may, I try to then write a post with my impressions of the book and whatever curious or interesting things I might have found in it.

A review is something else, something much more serious, and ought to be undertaken by someone who's actually competent at doing such things, which I'm definitely not. I'm just a random person with an uneducated, unqualified opinion about books I've read. My main purpose in writing these posts is because otherwise I'd often completely forget everything about some of the books I've read; but if I've written a post about it, I can look back at it later and I feel that the time I'd spent reading the book hadn't been completely wasted after all. But if you approach my posts looking for the sort of information and evaluation that you'd get in a real book review, it's inevitable that you'll be disappointed.