Today, I've been tackling March, but, instead of shoving all of those reviews into one post (as I kept trying to do, most of this morning), I'm going to space them out over the next week, to give the illusion of more content here at Antick Musings. They all share my newest label, Belated Review Files, which identifies a book I'm getting to write about much later than I should. (The first of those posts, covering Daniel Handler's Why We Broke Up, is already live.)
And here's what was going to be the introduction to that single overstuffed post, when it was a single post:
This is the third in a series of posts designed to get me back to even after I spent the first half of 2012 reading books and not writing about them. (Because what are we without our rituals and habits? Nothing!)
I did read these books four months ago, so my memories of them may be wrong in small or large ways; I'm certainly going to blame that if I get anything egregiously wrong. I'd also like to note that, if you happen to be the author of any of these books, I did appreciate it enough to read it all the way to the end and found it interesting enough to think and write about it afterward. That is not nothing; the engaged attention of readers is, under at least one theory, the whole point of writing to begin with. And, if I really do hate your book, I'll be sure to say so. (None of these qualify, I think, but I'll have to see what comes out of my fingers as I think about them.)
(And, yes, I am not blind to the irony that I'm "introducing" something with Belated in its name a week after I started it -- if one were kind, one might even say I planned that irony.)
Edit, five minutes later: I've also slightly updated the March index page, and you'll probably only care about that if you're literarily stalking me.
