In five weeks away from blogging, I didn’t miss it. On average. At first, it felt perverse to read some dazzling paragraph and not immediately jump online to type out the words and share them.
Addiction metaphors get tossed around way too lightly, but I do feel like I’ve shed a kind of dependency during this hiatus. Blogging itself isn’t the dependency. It just triggers it. I have the same defect that causes some published authors to make every-hour-on-the-hour checks of their Amazon sales ranks. Here, it’s not sales; it’s tweets and links and Likes and pageviews. Caring about these things is oppressive. I knew that already, but it’s been rejuvenating to go several weeks without caring at all.
Meanwhile, I’m on such a sweet run of books and audiobooks. There’s not a single book I’ve finished during these five weeks that I wouldn’t recommend. Here, since I haven’t been keeping track on a blog or anything, is what might be only a partial list:
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
Democracy by Joan Didion
Vintage Didion by Joan Didion
April 4, 1968 by Michael Eric Dyson
The Information by James Gleick
The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear
The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris
On Teaching and Writing Fiction by Wallace Stegner
