Oh… fancy meeting you here! It’s been awhile. As a whole, 2022 was a challenging year for me and the first week of 2023 looked like a turning point. I read 3 books and wrote several blog posts, all while having a great visit with family. Then in the next two weeks of January, my wonderful manager went to a different company; my volunteer group hosted our biggest event of the year; and I adopted a new cat. It has been a month. Fortunately, things are starting to settle down again and the break gave me a chance to think about what I want out of reading and blogging in the new year.
Reading
I probably am going to be reading less. I’m investing a lot of myself in work right now and sometimes just want to play computer games at night! I’m trying not to beat myself up about this.
Especially if I’m reading less, I’d like to get as much as I can out of my reading. I’m going to try to tie most of my reading to a themed focus this year. Right now, I’ve started reading through a pile of nonfiction on Russia and will tackle other topics as they strike me. I’m also back to doing some deep reading, using the reading techniques from the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast to think about important themes in each chapter of Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret. That feels like a little bit of a weird project, since I’m reading a book viewed as light fiction through a more literary lens. I’m still debating whether that would be of interest to anyone else and whether/how to share that here!
Blogging
Something else I’ve been interested in is seeing whether I can continue to write more detailed reviews that really engage with the contents of each book. I also have enjoyed reading cultural criticism, whether online or in essay collections. I’d like to bring those two things together and see if I can learn from resources on writing good cultural criticism. To start, I will be writing a few posts in response to these prompts to get students thinking about reviews and cultural criticism from The New York Times.
I’d also definitely like to actually get back to writing reviews! Hopefully this week is the week 
How is your blogging year going so far? Any advice for breaking out of a reading/blogging slump?
The post An Update on Reading, Blogging, and Life appeared first on Doing Dewey.
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