Sunday, February 6, 2011

Catching Up

I’ve been silent on this blog for a while, mostly because I’d been using it to write about books I’ve been reading, and somehow my attitude toward writing about books changed when I began reviewing regularly for Roverarts and Black Gate. It’s still fun, but I find I approach it with more seriousness, more weight — so writing becomes more time-consuming as a result. Add that to the fact that a lot of what I’m reading I’m also writing about for those sites, and I think it’s time that I rethought the purpoose of this blog. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions yet, but we’ll see what transpires.

Mewanwhile, I do still want to keep track of my reading, at least in terms of raw numbers. So let’s see: in October I read four books, one of them from the library, and due to the presence of two book fairs I added forty-three. So down forty on the month. In November I read two, and added thirteen; down eleven. In December I read four, and added nine; down five. In January I read seven, and added one; up six.

So in 2010 I read a hundred and two books, and added a total of thirty-three. That’s mostly due to three book fairs (Concordia, McGill, and the Friends of the Westmount Library) in October and November. Add my birthday in September and Christmas, and the trend here seems to be that I have to read a lot early in the year to have any hope of balancing out the amount of new books I get later on. Something to remember.

1 comment:

Ann Diamond said...

MONTREAL MAIN (the DVD) has been in my online shopping cart for a week, since I stumbled on it at the Arsenal Pulp site. And today I'm stumbling across this review Thanks for writing about this film, which I have not seen in 40 years, and was interested in revisiting. At the time it came out (early 70s), I found it disturbing to watch, and thought this was because I knew some of the creators/ characters in real life. I actually went to a few parties on the Main with "the hateful, misogynistic Bozo" who, in real life, was a sweet, funny, frenetic guy who knew and talked to everybody. Some of the biggest parties were at the loft of Stephen Lack. It was a strange, exciting time, or so we thought because we were young, but I was shocked by Montreal Main when I finally saw it, a couple of years later, at a repertory house in Hamilton, Ontario. I'd brought friends to introduce them to the world of Montreal movie-making, but I ended up more embarrassed by its raw "honesty" -- if that's what it was. I think it would be interesting to revisit this era, and this particular artifact -- in the light of a lot of lost innocence -- major understatement.