An Apologia for my Silence

Since beginning this blog in 2003, 2012 was the year in which I reviewed the fewest books, a mere 27. I actually read a bit more than that: there were a few reads, including some Kindle Singles, and a couple of audio books that I did not review. But it was still a very slow reading year. On the other hand, it was a great year as far as producing words for consumption went. My book Reading Herodotus: A Guided Tour Through the Wild Boars, Dancing Suitors, and Crazy Tyrants of The History came out this summer, and I also self-published a book--booklet, really--on Amazon called The Mutilation of the Herms: Unpacking an Ancient Mystery. Happily, almost immediately after Reading Herodotus came out, I embarked on another project, also for The Johns Hopkins University Press, and I've been diligently working on that this fall. 

I have, in fact, been reading a lot--articles and patches of books--but not very much for pure pleasure, and very little that I read from cover to cover. I find it hard to read for pleasure while I'm pleasantly immersed in a writing project. So, in short, don't despair over my silence: rejoice in my productivity.

For a long time now I've felt a bit burdened by the self-imposed obligation of reviewing pretty much all the books I read. Writing the thing, posting it in the proper format, adding the book and author to my pulldown menus, and so on. It's a chore. Some time back I started writing shorter reviews with a view to alleviating the burden, and I suppose that's helped. I also started to add that "tweetable review" section at the top, thinking that just maybe at some point I might only post reviews that short. I still don't know what the answer is. But I'm attempting here another possibility, brief mentions of books within blog posts to be titled something like, Also Read... or December Books. Stay tuned