Just a quick update to my readers so that you know I am still alive and well!
On top of getting my on-line tea and my yoga teaching businesses up and running, we were in the process of downsizing our home over the last year. This is all part of my five-plus year transition from my corporate high-tech sales career to more personally rewarding and heart-centered work. Much to most people’s disbelieve and chagrin, I had about 60 boxes of books. I had to move them physically between the old house, storage, and the new house about four or five times. Thank goodness for all that yoga or I might have hurt myself! And I’m transitioning from a dedicated library space in the old house to finding book space here and there in the new house. So there’s that.
All this is just to say, I apologize for the long intervals between my posts, as that has been incredibly distracting and kept me quite busy. As my readers should know, my posts are inherently slow by there very nature as I want to write about both the experience of the book as an object and as a reading experience. So if I’m going to review Les Miserables or Moby Dick, reading is going to take proportionally longer than a short work like The Iliad or the Poem of Force or poetry like Sonnets from the Portuguese. On the other hand, a short work of poetry or philosophy might take longer to contemplate, understand, and write coherently about than a novel. Then there is the fact that I take all the photographs as well. When I am approached by a press that wants to lend me a book to review, there is often a quite lengthy and amusing interval of silence when I tell them how long I will need the book. From that perspective, it’s good that most of the books reviewed are mine and I can take my time and not feel that time pressure of imposing on someone else. Then it’s just the pressure I put on myself. Like the 1933 Limited Editions Club Don Quixote (and the Folio Society Limited Edition) sitting on my shelf waiting for me to have the energy for another foray into that long read and to compare it with my last read/review of the Arion Press edition.
In any case, this blog is a personal work of love, so I appreciate your patience and support as I manifest my lifelong love of books and reading in this deeply personal way. News at the speed of a hand press, indeed! But never fear, the next review is in process now…