Metadiscourse

Despite the fact that I’m not especially great at keeping track of my goals each year, I always go through the exercise of reflecting on my goals from last year and setting some new reading and blogging goals for the next year.

Last night I had every intention of writing a review to post today, but my brain was fried and, apparently, checked-out for my Christmas vacation a day early. It’s probably just as well. I think most people are in the same boat — already gone for the holidays or getting reading to leave. Things will be quiet around here until next week, Monday or Tuesday, depending on when I get home from my parents’ house.

This is not to say I’ve got the blogging thing figured out. Far from it, in fact. What it does mean, however, is that I have a good sense of how I operate and some ways to be at my blogging best (even if I don’t always do that…).

One area I continue to struggle with, however, is developing a “best practice” for responding to and leaving comments. I have a way of doing comments that I’ve developed, but recently it’s started to become overwhelming and I think I need a new plan.

Despite how much I’ve been writing here, I’ve actually been doing some posts in other places around the Interwebz, which I wanted to take a moment to share.

First up is a review of Jim Lehrer’s book about his time moderating presidential debates, Tension City. I thought this book was a delightfully nerdy and awesome look behind-the-scenes at an event so many people watch but few people understand.

If you take out the Read-a-Thon, October was another relatively slow reading month around these parts. I finished 10 books total, but four of them were part of the Read-a-Thon. In months past, I’ve finished 10 books easily, but since moving and taking the new job my reading pace has slowed pretty dramatically.

How long do you suppose it will take for me to admit that I’m read slower now and start to accept a new normal book-finishing pace?

If you’ve been on Twitter much the last couple weeks, you’ve probably seen some posts about Book Riot, a mysteriously blank-looking site with the tagline, “It’s not a book club… it’s a movement.”

Now that it’s finally October 3 — launch day — get to help spread the news about what the site is since I’m going to be one of the regular contributors.

In case you were counting, I missed reflecting on my July reading and setting up a reading list for August. With The Move it just didn’t seem like it mattered much, and since my August reading was so skewed towards fiction, I doubt I would have stuck with a list anyway.

But as of today I’ve been at my new job three weeks, almost all the boxes are unpacked, and I’ve been settling (slowly) into my new routine (if being a newspaper editor even has a routine… so far every day has been totally different from the day before).

Point the First: Thank you everyone for your very kind and supportive comments on my big “I’m Moving!” announcement earlier this week. I’m not going to have time to respond to all the comments, but they mean the world to me. It’s really amazing how supportive online communities can be.

Point the Second: I recently had a review published in our local newspaper for Paul Farmer’s new book, Haiti: After the Earthquake. You might be familiar with Farmer because of Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is one of my favorite narrative nonfiction reads.

For the last several months I’ve been putting together a list of books I’m hoping to read during that month. Some months have been more successful than others, but it’s still fun to think about books, make the list, and have it around for a guide if I get stuck trying to decide what to read.

I had a list of eight books I wanted to finished in June. I ended up reading nine books, but only four of them were from the original list