Meta: What’s up with all the Reading?

So far this year, I’ve published seven posts with the tag “reading “. Of 24 posts this year (already more than all of 2009!), that’s almost a third of my blogging. Put another way, in the first five years of blogging I wrote four book-related posts; I’ve almost doubled that in the first quarter of 2010.

I’ve always loved reading. In middle school, I’d sit with a novel in my lap, trying to read during class without getting caught. Going into this year, I wanted to try things that I hypothesized would make me a better writer. One of these things is reading, specifically reading and thinking about what makes a book or story work or not for me. Another of the things is blogging¹, so it made sense to me that I would start to blog what I read. I also wanted to keep track of what I read a little better. Instead of using this as another excuse to build a tool that I’m not sure I’ll actually use, I’m just using tags on the posts: sfpl for books I check-out from the the San Francisco Public Library, fiction for works of fiction, etc. I’d like to use something more structured for this (probably RDFa), but right now I have enough half finished software projects, so tags it is.

And that’s why my blog seems like a book report lately.

¹ I see blogging as a practice: something that I do with regularity, which has immediate and cumulative benefits.