While I have been reading, my blogging just has not been as steady recently. I think that's because I've been reading to read instead of reading to write. It might also be because I haven't found as many "notable moments" to write about--or I might have had "close reading" overload.
I dropped off while trying to "catch up" and retroactively blog Diana Gabaldon's Voyager after tearing through the book itself. It really is a very robust novel, and draws on each and every thread that I had identified in the previous two books. That's great, right? It represents a certain coherence in the writing that signals an author who knows her plan and sticks to it, which is great for a reader because it imparts a sense of continuity, even for readers who do not notice every thread. For a reader/critic/writer and blogger who does notice many of the threads--with eager interest, I might add--and who has no particular thesis--or else several theses that could emerge as several chapters of a book on the novels, well, to keep up with every thread is sort of exhausting!! And that's where I found myself. So having blogged most of Voyager, I sort of... dropped it. I've made my peace with that, I think.
In the meantime, I have read a lot and blogged some of it--Neil Gaiman's American Gods (which defies my analysis at the present, being a weird book), The Hunger Games (the blogging of which is still incomplete, as I have not yet written about literacy in the trilogy), Regina Doman's Rapunzel Let Down (which I wrestled with and might have beaten to death), and the Harry Potter series, which I did not blog extensively about because not many moments jumped out at me begging for analysis.
In the meantime, I have moved to a new and larger dwelling, wrestled with my ongoing professional angst, and learned and taught a new software program (InDesign, which nearly beat me in the end....) I have also revised my 2011 NaNoWriMo "novel" (which I will think of as a novel rather than a "novel" only if it is published) and submitted it to a contest--we'll see how that works out. I also backed out of a conference presentation that I was to give on blogging "notable moments" as a means of combatting "shallow reading," and started thinking about how personality types influence reading preferences and personal engagement with texts. And an article abstract about the "subversive rhetoric of time travel" in Gabaldon's novels was, sadly, rejected.
Since I haven't been blogging about Gabaldon's novels, Random House decided that this was a perfect opportunity to sponsor a "read-along" of the whole series in preparation for the release of book 8, Written in My Own Heart's Blood, in March. By "read-along," they basically mean "get-the-fans-excited-by-posting-passages-from-each-consecutive-book-on-Facebook-until-March"--which, strangely enough, intersects with my "notable moment" project rather nicely.
All this is to say that while I have given up on blogging Voyager, probably for good, I am currently rereading book #4, The Drums of Autumn. And maybe a thing or two will jump out and beg for analysis.... At any rate, I'm getting back into that world for a while, so you can find me there, perhaps reading a little less for escapism this time around? We'll see...
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