9 Year Blogiversary!

Babbling Books is nine years old today! This anniversary brings a mini – crisis in my blogging activities but optimism for the future. The mini – crisis that I refer to will be evident to anyone who has been following this blog, that is, I have not been posting much.

The reason that I have not put up a lot of entries in the past few months in twofold. The reasons are also related. The first is that I have been working more and more hours at my job. These hours have been escalating. I have been working more in the past few weeks then I have worked since my blog started. In fact, I remember that 9 years ago, I started my blog shortly after a work project ended that was taking up a lot of time. At the time, I figured that the extra hours could be devoted to blogging. 

 

The second reason is something that happens from time to time. I have been stuck in a period of what I will describe as lower motivation. Much of this low motivation is part of the natural cycles of ups and downs. However, another related factor is the fact that about two months ago the keyboard on my desktop  computer died. I replaced it with something that I had lying around, but something that I thought would be a good choice. It was a Macally keyboard that was a large piece of hardware. I thought that its size and apparent sturdiness would be good for writing. However, in retrospect it it turns out that using it was an unpleasant experience.  Among other things it led to a lot of typos and missed key strokes.  I have replaced it with an Apple Magic Keyboard which is ironically much smaller but much easier and pleasant to write with. I did not realize that this poor keyboard experience was keeping me away from writing, but once I replaced it, writing blog posts became a positive experience again.    

I must admit that had my busyness at work coincided with a period of higher motivation for blogging, that I would have still managed to post more. I am naturally a very slow writer, so the combination of these two factors has really slowed down my posting.  

 

The really good news is that, while the long hours at work were caused by several factors, the biggest driver of time at work was a project that was just concluded on January 31^st. I should be working a lot less now. I am hoping that this freeing of my time will be also help spur more motivation to write blogs.

 

Thus, I am optimistic that I will be posting more frequently going forward and that 2021 will be a good year for blogging. I am looking forward to the future. Have no fear, Babbling Books should still be around for a while. 

 

As I do every year, I want to thank all my wonderful commenters. I am grateful to everyone who has taken the time to comment and engage in my comments section. Interaction with other bloggers in our comments sections is one of the main reasons to blog in the first place. 

Happy reading and blogging in 2021 everybody!

8 Years Old!

Babbling Books is eight years old today! The term often used for these milestones is blogiversary. Time seems like it is passing so quickly. It feels like it was just yesterday that I started the blog. 

Every year I thank the blogging community. I think that it is very important to do so. What makes my blog worthwhile is the people who read it and who comment here. I want to that everyone who spends time at my site. I especially want to thank the people who leave comments. My commenters are fantastic. So that you everybody who reads and comments here. 

It is also the New Year. In the past, I have never been one to make resolutions or change directions at this time of year. If I wanted to change something, I usually would do so whenever I thought to do it. However, this New Year has gotten me to thinking. Over the past year I have been reading more than a few books that focused on current social issues and the debates that surround them. While this has not been a bad direction to go in, and I feel that I gained knowledge and insight from these books, reading time is very precious.  Personally, I place greater value reading books that will be applicable ten years from now, or even one hundred years from now, over books whose ideas have a shorter shelf life. I cannot read everything that I want to so I have to pick and choose. Thus, I will likely read and post about less of these current – issue works and instead concentrate more on books that I deem to be more centered upon universal themes. That does not mean that I will completely refrain from reading books on current topics. In fact, there is one in particular, that will be published in the coming months, that I want to read and will likely want to post about. However, I will likely read less of them. 

In addition, I would like to read more books. However, I have a busy life and limited time will make this goal a little more difficult to attain. In past years I have also set out to read more and have done so. I managed to succeed in this by being more efficient with my time and devoting more time to reading. Because of these past efforts I have already plucked a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of wasted time.  Thus it will now be more difficult to increase my reading time. With that, I will try to read at least a little more in  2020. Those are my bookish thoughts and goals for the coming year. 

I hope that everyone has a fruitful and enjoyable reading year in 2020. I am looking forward to further reading adventures myself. Happy reading everyone!

6 Years Old!

Babbling Books is six years old today. In past years on my blogiversary I have extolled the virtues of the book blogger community. I will again acknowledge my fellow book bloggers.  The community is indeed the best part of book blogging. This community  is what has kept me blogging over the course of years. 

When I started blogging six years ago I wanted my site to be more then just book reviews. I wanted to explore history, social issues, politics, religion as well as a plethora of other topics and ideas.  I wanted to approach these concepts from a bookish point of view. I hope that to some extent I have succeeded. I try to tackle these topics both in my commentary on individual books as well as in standalone posts.  

In a perfect world I would blog more. I would like to put up more posts related to ideas, social issues and perhaps politics. Books and reading relate to all these things. Time constraints unfortunately limit me. With that, though I am not big on New Years Resolutions, I will endeavor to post more in the coming year. Of course, I also want to read more books. That, in the end needs to be my number one priority.

Many of my fellow bloggers have posted lists of their planed reads for the year. I also have a lot of tentative reading plans. There are so many great books waiting in the wings. There are so many fascinating topics to explore. Thus, the coming year promises to be great year for blogging. I hope that will be the case for all my blogger friends as well as for myself. 

Happy reading everybody!