While in the back of my mind this was apparent many months (years?) ago, I didn't acknowledge it until recently. Blogging is rather passé. Sure, if you google something like "is blogging dead?" you will find articles saying "NO!" but that is because businesses still occasionally have blog pages that no one wants to dismiss as redundant. But let's be real. Most successful blog pages have been around for 20 years and no one who starts one now is going to make anything of it. So, that's that.
However, my tiny little blog page never aspired to be anything but ramblings from my mind, an occasional cool photo, sometimes a book recommendation and general whining prose. So that's not going to stop. Here we go.
There is absolutely nothing to discuss at this moment that bears any weight because EVERYTHING right now is enormously weighty and fraught with angst and anger and fear. Therefore, resorting to talking about junky stuff is the only way to even vaguely consider putting words down on paper. If I was a real writer, someone like Ann Patchett or a journalist like Sam Anderson, writing about anything would result in a great book or an intriguing column in the NYT. That is so not me. My words are caught up in the mundane, the boring, the everyday drippings of a small, enclosed life. But since I don't care who reads this, those drippings will continue to serve as the basis for random thoughtless musings.
Somewhere in my strolling through the internet, I have absorbed book recommendations and have added them to my library list of books to read. Many times those books are boring or pedantic or of no interest, something I don't discover until actually getting them out of the library and attempting to read them. For example: historical fiction: how many more books do we need of a plucky young woman in war-torn Europe who ends up saving thousands of refugees from the gas chamber while carrying on a painful romance with a soldier who will eventually be killed on the battlefield just as the plucky woman realizes she is pregnant with his child and sneaks aboard a transatlantic ship and arrives in American in 1944 to become a world-renown seamstress for an incredibly famous fashion designer? Too much, too many words and it's giving "historical fiction" a bad name, like, perhaps, "hysterical friction."
But I digress. Many times those random recommendations lead me to a book I would have never found on my own. I just finished reading a small novel written in 1965 called "Stoner" by John Williams about a very sad, lonely man named William Stoner. An oddly compelling story, very well written if somewhat of a downer. And now I am half-way through another small book written in 1960 called "So Long, See You Tomorrow" by William Maxwell who wrote more than a dozen books, none of which I have ever heard of. It's another story about a lonesome man, living in the early 20th century, trying to align his past with his current life. Very good, introspective and thoughtful.
All this is to say that sometimes a book report is the only thing worth writing about. Sometimes reading is the only thing that gets one through the day, especially in these times that are overwhelmingly frightening and awful. A good book, a good glass of wine or whiskey, a cozy reading spot.
Read on, my friends.
