Some thoughts for December 2013

It's coming close to the end of 2013 and there are some things playing on my mind that I feel like exploring a little bit here.

First of all, I will have been keeping this blog and this record for three years come January, which is a pretty big deal I guess. I initially started out this project as a way of documenting what I read, as I read so much that I found I had a tendency to forget what I felt about certain books after I read them. In my time working for bookshops and publishers I had also acquired a growing number of books and I guess I wanted some way of cataloguing what I owned and what I was reading, etc.

While I was still involved in the book industry, there was more of a drive to this, I guess, in that I was keeping up more with book-related news, and it was using social media to make connections with people I found interesting or just to see what was going on.

Which I guess leads me on to 'secondly', which is that I'm not really sure what the purpose of this blog is anymore. I'm fairly certain I don't have any readers, so who is my audience and who am I writing for? Myself? I feel like my voice (whatever that is) has a slight self-consciousness to it in that I know that people can read this, but I'm not really expecting them to. As a result I think a lot of my writing on here has become sloppy and not particularly passionate. My 'reviews' tend to focus on whether or not I enjoyed a book, rather than looking at it critically in any way, or thinking about it deeply. And that's fine! To a certain extent. However it's also becoming apparent to me that it's not particularly satisfying, either. So I guess I need to make a decision with this. I need to either close up shop and make this private if no one is ever going to see it and it's just a record for myself, or I need to re-commit and throw myself into it again, put some thought into the words I'm stringing together and put myself out there. To what end? I'm not really sure.

What I am sure of is that I love reading. I love being transported into another world, I love seeing things from someone else's point of view, I love learning, I love becoming invested in the stories and the characters, I love the loyalties to my various favourite authors who I can rely on to provide this transportation to their world.

I haven't read nearly as many books this year as I did in 2011 and 2012, which makes me kind of sad, because books are my thing and if I'm not passionate about them then I'm not really passionate about anything, and I'm just not really doing much with myself, I guess.

I don't know what I want to do with myself in the future of my life - whether I want a career, or whether I want to settle down, or whether I want to travel, but I know that I pretty much need books to be a part of it in some way.

I think that's as good a place as any to start making a commitment from.