Bowing to the Inevitable

For someone with my chosen avocation, it’s a small bit of irony that, for all my friendly, outgoing nature, I’m actually something of an introvert.  Try to engage me in idle chit-chat about nothing in particular (i.e. make small talk) and I’m useless, generally running dry of things to say within about 5 minutes.  And yet, get me going on a specific topic, and I can talk away for ages.  Indeed, just try to stop me.

In that vein, there are times when something arises which I’m just choking to comment on, and I find myself without an outlet to vent my thoughts.

Until now.  ::cue dramatic chord::

This all started because of a Facebook application called “Pick Your 5,” where — you guessed it — you pick your top 5 of whatever: books, movies, albums, you name it.  You can even make it more specific: my favourite Sci Fi books, my favourite 80s TV shows, the top 5 albums that influenced me as a musician.  Whatever floats your boat.  So I, being a bookish sort, decided to name my top 5 books.

Only I couldn’t.

I managed to get it to 10 — 2 separate top 5 lists — but even then, my heart was crying out, “More!  We need more!  How could you possibly forget Fredric Brown, you heathen, you philistine?”  As well, I couldn’t tell everyone why I loved those books so much, what about them affected me so deeply that I couldn’t possibly exclude them from my life, never mind my really rather inconsequential list.  It was decided, then: I needed a forum to lay down these thoughts, whether or not anyone ever actually ended up reading it.  And what if I wanted to write about something else, heaven forbid: a movie that struck my fancy, or a TV show, or — heaven forbid — something in the news or a matter of politics?  (Don’t worry, that won’t happen too often.  Yay, Obama!  There, I’ve said it, I’m done now.)  Therefore, I wanted to be able to organise my posts nicely in an easy-access sort of fashion (i.e. use tags etc.), something I couldn’t really do (not the way I envisioned it, anyway) on Facebook.

No, I had to face the rather ugly truth of it: it was finally time to start a blog.

I’m not a big blog follower, as I’ve never found one with much worth saying, or not on a regular basis, anyway.  Five sentences of text and a link to a video?  That’s your entry for the day?  No thanks.  [Note: that's also why I've never had the slightest interest in Twitter, so don't even ask.]  I’ll try to hold myself to my own exacting standards: I’ll only post if there’s something I need to get off my chest.  That means this will likely be only infrequently updated (of course my work and home life will be contributing factors as well), but at least you know that when something goes up here, I mean it.

I’ve got some things to get me started, anyway: the aforementioned books (I plan on covering a lot more than just 10 in here).  I’m not going to limit myself to just books on here, but I imagine it’ll be a high enough proportion of my output, and at least I’ve got some material to keep this ticking over initially.

Also, have a look at the “About” page, as I’ve put up not only a description of the blog (a sort of condensed version of what I’ve said here) but also some info about where I chose my username and the blog title from (for those of you who don’t know).

I’ll leave you with that for now.  Welcome, and thanks for reading.  And tell anyone else you think might be interested. :)

BTW,  your first reading assignment is the book I’ll cover in my first review: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, which also happens to be my favourite book.  I’d better warn you about this book, though: There are 7 chapters, and chapters 2-6 comprise the bulk of the narrative and happen in sequential order.  The first chapter, though, happens 53 years after the events in the main narrative, and chapter 7 follows on (timeline-wise) from the first chapter.  I only mention this as there’s only an incredibly vague mention of this in the text, so the first time you read the book, it can be a bit jarring: you read the first chapter, fine, grand, then you start the second chapter… and the narrative changes gears completely, leaving you wondering what the heck just happened.  Well, the author just jumped 53 years back in the narrative to show you the events that lead up to chapter 1.  So, my advice to the first-time reader is: read chapter 1, then — keeping in mind the narrative shift — read chapters 2-6, then *go back* and read chapter 1 again (it will make a lot more sense now), then read chapter 7.