One of the disadvantages of my practice of trying to enter my book and movie reviews on the days that I finish the book or watch the movie is that I feel like I have to hold off anything that happens after any reviews I haven't gotten around to writing yet so that my readers won't miss anything if they go back until they see something they've seen before each time they visit. (reading that over, I realize that that is one messed up sentence, but I can't bring myself to rework it to actually make sense because I'm not sure that's possible.) The problem is that this forces me to get further and further behind, especially when I see or read something that I want to think about a bit before reviewing.
This evening I've been clearing out the backlog, and in the process noticed a couple of movies that fell through the cracks, so if you're a completist, you'll have to pop back in time and see the review I forgot to write until tonight of Moonlight Mile in addition to scanning back over the stuff that has appeared since the last time you were here.
Of course since I only have about 5 regular readers, this isn't quite the catastrophe I'm making out ;-)
Anyway, as of now I'm all caught up for the first time in a long while.
Posted by jeffy at July 13, 2003 02:45 AMI don't get *why* you have this practice. can you explain?
Posted by: Anita Rowland at July 13, 2003 10:26 AMThat's a totally fair question, Anita.
It's partly a historical artifact of my pre-blog website where I recorded my book reviews with an indication of when I finished them (which, in turn, is a historical artifact of the fact that I had used a remaindered paper diary as my method of tracking what books I had read before I started writing reviews.)
I like being able to look back and see when I finished a book. And I really keep all these lists more for myself than anything else. It's cool if other people get something out of them, but that's not why I do it.
There's also the benefit that when I have to tie the review to the date I finished the thing then it keeps me from putting off writing the review indefinitely, something I have a tendency to do for any activity that I haven't already got complete in my head. (I didn't say it was healthy! ;-)
I guess I could decouple the chronological list nature of my booklists from the blog, it just seemed like that was actually the match between the blog nature and what I'd already been doing with my book lists (and movie lists though those were never online) since the early 90s.
I think I see a way to do it similar to the mini-link meme that has struck Electrolite, Making Light, and Macadamia, maybe I'll give it a try. Of course I can't see how to do that completely in my head, so don't hold your breath.
Posted by: Jeff Youngstrom at July 13, 2003 11:41 AM