Since my ruthless spring-clean-out of blogs I am pleased to say that I am squandering far less time online perusing the self-congratulatory bum-licking that persists in academic blogs of a Certain Persuasion. Also less time on blogs that just serve up dull lists of who's reviewed what. And much less time reading the mad ravings of bitter nobodies with teeny-tiny-teensie points to make that, frankly, no-one gives a fish's tit about. Ah! That's better! I can't say I've missed any of the ones that I've deleted.But I do miss having something to read over my mid-morning coffee, and although I have had a look at a couple of news sites, I'd really like to find a blog that has something new to say of interest on a regular basis. A lot of bloggers seem to start off with good intentions and then, I guess, the novelty wears off or the pressure of work diverts them. Or maybe they run out of things to say. A couple I discovered haven't had any posts for months and are going to go in the second-wave of blog-culls soon.
The Times Literary Supplement is always good browsing, and the articles are sufficiently long to take up an entire coffee break. Having said that I don't think I'll be stumping up cash if The Times presses ahead with plan to charge for reading their online editions. The TLS writing's usually pretty high-quality too, which one might expect from people who....well, write for a living. The down-side of this is that most reviews end with book details, which makes me jump immediately onto Amazon, and then of course I have to look at my recommendations, and before long I've made an inadvisable purchase. If I'm honest, books are coming in faster than I can read them, a problem addressed in one of my other blogs
hypatia-morebooksthansense.blogspot.com ( in truth - just a dull list of books)
but if I'm honest, even that doesn't reveal the full horror of my morbid bibliophilia. I'm lucky in that my doctoral bursary covers the book bills, but some of the stuff I can't really justify. Actually, having said that I bought Neil Gaiman's American Gods on the strength of just having read up on the bicameral mind theory. Good justification, eh?
Still, all good things come to an end, as will my funding eventually and I'll be left, scratching and babbling vacantly, sitting on a midden of books. Even the husband, tolerant to the nth degree, looked around in a rather irritated fashion the other day and noted the colossal number of books scattered about. And this after he'd built two full-height, full-wall bookshelves to accommodate my stuff a couple of years ago. A lot of the volumes could go, the Classics text books in particular(but NOT my Loeb Classical Texts!), but I am loath to sell them at the risible prices they would command. I suppose I could donate them to my old university library, but it looks like the Classics department there is going to be run-down in the 'Ratnerisation' of the Russell Group and in favour of something less elitist like nail therapy or welding theory. So I'm going to hang onto them, even if it means boxing them up for storage in the attic. Maybe I could become an Amazon subsidiary seller.....but that means I'd be on Amazon even more, so any money I made would be ploughed back immediately into the Behemoth That Sunk Borders and is currently hammering nails into the coffin of many independent book shops. *shakes fist* Damn you, Amazon! Why do you always have to have the stock in at such reasonable prices!!! Just add the thrill of a package plopping through the letter-box and you've got me, quivering, in your thrall.....
