I’m not sure I can describe what I’m in as a blogging slump when I’ve just finished my 13th review for Shiny and have three more to write over the course of the week. But I’m certainly on my way to being all reviewed out. I’d like to say that I don’t know how I ended up with so many reviews to write, but of course I do. It’s too easy to say yes here and yes there, and over the course of three months, those yeses really build up. And this time around I’ve read quite a few books that were very good but for which I wasn’t exactly the right audience, perhaps. It’s funny how hard it is to tell, even after all these years of intensive reading, which books will fall in the sweet spot. It’s part of the fun of reading, the not knowing, but you can fall foul of it too.
Anyway, I’ve decided to take a break from reviewing on this blog. I’ll still keep talking about books – what else is there to talk about? – but there must be other ways to talk about them. I’ve signed up to write some longer literary pieces for another online journal, Numéro Cinq, and I’m looking forward to that. It’ll be a chance to get arty and complex in a way I haven’t done for a while (I’m wondering if I still know how to, we’ll have to see how it goes). But that’s going to be a big call on my time as well. I’m very conscious, too, that I haven’t left as many comments with my virtual friends as I ought to have done lately. I’ve been reading all your brilliant posts but really, I’m running low on words about books. Or maybe just running low on words.
I know blogging ebbs and flows, and that the best thing to do is go with it. I’ll certainly continue to turn up here at least once a week with some sort of dispatch from the reading life, and I can assure you that the Summer edition of Shiny New Books, out on the 9th July, is going to be fab.
