I Should Read More is starting back up!
Plus, some questions about Substack and Twitter
2023 was the worst year of my life, by a healthy margin.
It started out with my mother suddenly dying in April, as I wrote about in my hiatus post. Before I could even get on the plane for her funeral, I lost a job inches away from an offer that I had spent a month on. Shortly after returning home, my 3-year old son had a scheduled MRI due to nasty headaches. Turns out it was from something called a chiari malformation (basically where your brain is too large for your skull and it puts compression pressure on it near the spine). That led to several more rounds of appointments before we traveled out-of-state for brain surgery in September.
He’s fine, and surgery has a very successful success rate, but taking three children on a trip where an almost-four-year-old spends a week in a hospital bed is not exactly a rejuvenating experience. But he’s a happy, healthy kiddo and that feels like a miracle sometimes.
The day before we left, one of our two long-term dogs passed away, and the other passed in December. My wife’s side of the family also had some major events occur, all while I had my busiest year at work ever.
To summarize: 2023 was exhausting. It was complete shit, and there wasn’t much of a break for almost twelve months straight. After it ended, I realized that I hadn’t been doing much of anything. I wasn’t reading, I wasn’t playing video games (but boy did I stress purchase them), I wasn’t even really watching TV. I don’t even know if I’d categorize it as depression as much as it was an all-encompassing suck of any free time and energy to spend.
But — I’m back! I’ve slid back into reading (with some help of a book club at work), and I realized that holy shit I miss this. So I’m starting this up again because I never really wanted to stop it in the first place.
I’ve had this return in my head for a week or two but wanted to think on it first. Here’s what I’ve realized:
I’m not going to review every book I read. This was causing me some stress before (and is an entirely self-imposed rule)! It’s not that I don’t give scores in my head, but I have no idea how to present a review on book 9 of a series in a way that would make anyone really care. Maybe if I feel like it, I’ll do some mini-reviews.
This stuff with the Hugos has nearly entirely turned me off from them for the time being. I still expect my reviews to have some overlap, and I’m going to pull from the lists, but I have zero interest in reading each finalist like I’ve done in years past. Saying that they need to clean house is an understatement — until the rot is removed, I’m keeping my distance.
I need to time-box my reviews. Sometimes, this will mean shorter reviews. Sometimes it will mean no quotes in my reviews, and sometimes it’ll result in some grouped mini-reviews instead of full ones. But I don’t have the bandwidth to make all my reviews shimmer, and more importantly, it wears me out if I go overboard. I tend to have a bad habit of going overboard, and I need to be cognizant of the balance between I am producing quality reviews and I am making this feel like work.
Holy crap, I have a lot of ARCs that I agreed to back in early 2023 that have now basically all released. Bad news is that I still agreed to review them, good news is that most looked very interesting and I read very little last year anyway, so here’s some places to start. I’m focusing on these for the time being.
And lastly, I’m very confused about the current state of social media — which is a surprisingly great place for me to be given how much time I used to spend on there! I disconnected entirely right around the time that Twitter was starting to fight with Substack, and I’m not entirely sure how that ended. I’m hoping some folks could help me with the following:
Are people still really using Twitter?
Is Bluesky the consensus alternative right now? Is it worth posting to both?
If Twitter is still hiding Substack links, is it worth using Twitter at all? Any creative ways around it? I love how easy Substack is to use and I’m not planning on ditching it.
My read on the situation is that I’ll probably be making a bluesky soon for ISRM. I’ll post that here when it’s done. I’m hoping to get the reviews rolling again soon, but easing back into this is important for me. I’m still tired, it takes me longer to read than it used to, and it’s no longer instinctual for me to pick up my Kindle during downtime — but all of these are getting better already, and I’m excited to be back doing what I like.
Cheers, and I hope to see you around.
— Adam
I'm not a power user or anything, but there are enough people who didn't leave Twitter that I am still on there (though I also have a much neglected Bluesky). Sorry to hear about your bad year, but I'm glad things are looking up (at least for your reading).