A Preface to 2016

A man is more likely to pursue his goals seriously if he makes a public commitment, and since some of my goals for this year concern this blog I thought I’d go ahead and offer this “preface” for 2016.

First, I plan to publish a new post every week, as I did from late 2011 through early 2013. This weekly schedule was difficult at times, but the routine was satisfying for me and should also, I think, give you the readers something to look forward to more regularly. To start, this will likely be every Tuesday, though that will be subject to change depending on how my schedule changes during the year. If possible I’ll try to post multiple times in a week, so subscribing to the RSS feed may be a good idea if you just cannot stand the thought of missing out, but for now I’ll only guarantee that one Tuesday post (or your money back!).

This schedule will be a bit difficult, since I mostly review books which, of course, vary wildly in length, so I’ll start the year with a few short books that I can review and schedule out, and write up a couple of evergreen posts to fill any gaps that come up. Once I have a comfortable buffer, though, I plan on doing sticking to (mostly) syntopical reading.

The primary goal will be to finish the books I have on the War Between the States. I did one book last year, Trudeau’s biography of Robert E. Lee, but I’m currently working on Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, which will be followed by Jefferson Davis’s The Rise of the Confederate Government and its follow-up The Fall of the Confederate Government, Raphael Semmes’s Memoirs of a Service Afloat During the War Between the States, and a couple more biographies. Unfortunately, these are all very long, hence the concern with a “buffer” I just mentioned.

Second, I’ll be going through all of Shakespeare’s works, which I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. These will be scattered throughout the year, though, rather than one after another.

Beyond that, I would like to go through a number of Greek classics, as well as the many books by, and about, Ezra Pound that I own. There are also a lot of odds and ends, of course, that I’ll get to as time permits - mostly more books, but also whatever movies, games, and such that I think are worth writing about.

So, those are the goals. Blogging year 2016 will officially start next Tuesday, and as always, thanks for reading.