Preface

This is a bit of an experiment, inspired by the way I noticed updating my status on the Facebook application Visual Bookshelf was strangely addictive, and from reading Nick Hornby’s collection of reader’s diary columns for the American magazine The Believer: The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. Nick Hornby writes far better than me, but hey, I thought having a record of the books I get through (and fail to get through) could be an interesting idea.

I love reading. I have been told by some people that I “eat books”. This is in reference to the fact they consider me the fastest reader in the West. I do read fast, but sometimes this means I lose some of the detail. I have to go back over a page a couple of times and make sure I’ve actually taken it in, to make sure I come away with more than just a general feeling from the book. Sometimes I do that and that’s all I get anyway.

The end of that last paragraph begins to explain the other motivation for starting this blog: writing about the actual experience of something in a concrete way is hard. It’s a challenge to produce a well-written review which isn’t pithy or clichéd. At the start of this it may just be a case of spewing stuff out on the page about Things I Noticed and Liked About this Book, almost like a primary school book report. I might end up just noting down three sentences about something, or going off into a rant. The style of my undergraduate English Literature essays and any related academic jargon will be something to be avoided, but I have a bit of a suspicion some of it might try and creep in from the deeper recesses of my brain.

So… here we go.