Obviously I’m thrilled to be included in the Times’ (UK) list of “Forty bloggers who really count.” As is my nature, I also feel anxious and unworthy, but at a certain point (which came for me a long time ago) it is tacky and seems disingenuous to say so. Feel free to call me on that.
This month marks eight years since I started blogging. When I began, not long before this photo was taken, I figured the whole endeavor would quickly and unceremoniously go the way of my first website, which I set up in 1995, decorated with little New Yorker drawings, and abandoned to disappear along with everything else on the Alachua Freenet.
If you’d told me in 2002 that I would keep at this for so long or that so many people would know about this site or care what I had to say, I probably would’ve reacted the way I did to two boys in elementary school who said I was pretty: decided you were mocking me and head-butted you to the ground, shouting, “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”
I’m grateful to all of you who’ve visited this site through its many permutations. Even now, every six months or so, I find myself re-evaluating and changing what I do here.
This year I’ve posted more sporadically, read fewer new books, and written far less book criticism, so as to finish the novel that, as the Times notes, has yet to materialize. (The list compilers were very kind about the delay, actually. I wonder sometimes: John Steinbeck aside, has anyone in the history of letters ever whinged so publicly and at such length about writing a book that does not even exist?)
I find myself focusing — here, at Twitter, and elsewhere — ever more unapologetically on the strange assortment of writers and cultural phenomena that interest me. In the last six months, I’ve obsessed over Muriel Spark and day jobs, begun writing an intermittent column on Christian fundamentalism, tried to explain my reasons for writing a novel rather than a memoir, outed myself — at NPR, no less — as a hypochondriac with a disorder of the humors, and discovered that the archives of my great-great aunt (and self-given namesake) are held by the State of Mississippi.
Which is to say: If my perspective and voice are the strengths of this site, they are also its limitations.
The truth is that, nowadays, there are so many excellent sites keeping up with book news, interviewing authors, reviewing novels, and commenting on publishing, my own appetite for participating in generalized literary talk has dwindled. I read other sites as widely as ever, though, and I’ve been interested to observe the evolution of book blogs.
Whether you’re just stopping by or are a regular reader, I’d like to direct you to some other bookish venues that you might enjoy (and want to send copies of your books to, sinc
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