Getting This Blog Back on Track

As you may have noticed, I haven’t exactly been active on this blog. There are two main reasons for this.

1.) For the past year, I have been the Website Manager for student magazine Writer’s Block, and I was doing essentially the same thing over there that I do over here: rant about things I’m passionate about. For that reason, this blog became very inactive. Over the coming weeks, I’ll do my best to get this blog going again, and I’ll post links to some of the articles I wrote for Writer’s Block so you can get a sense of what I’ve been doing, in case you’re still interested.

2.) I graduated both my bachelor’s programmes by writing 2 theses, so I was pretty busy writing. I might also share my theses here with you online, although I wasn’t exceptionally happy with at least one of them.

Getting this blog back on track, of course, is mostly about writing new content and sharing it with you, but it is also a little bit about updating it pages, so here we go.

I’m updating the books page to a 2019 edition, so here is a quick overview of what I read in 2018:

January

1. Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda – Becky Albertalli

2. Boy Meets Boy – David Levithan

3. The Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt

4. The Beatrice Letters – Lemony Snicket

5. Flowers For Algernon – Daniel Keyes

March

6. The Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri

7. You Talkin’ To Me? – Sam Leith

April

8.  Bartleby The Scrivener – Herman Melville

9. The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

10. Waiting For Godot – Samuel Beckett

11. Foe – J.M. Coetzee

June

12. The Pale King – David Foster Wallace

Around this time I also began reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It is to blame for the fact that I read very few other books for the rest of the year and nothing at all in January and February of 2019.

July

13. Sex op z’n Duits – Linda Duits

14. Missing Kissinger – Etgar Keret

December

15. My Purple-Scented Novel – Ian McEwan

That’s it. Just 15 books.

Another part of updating the blog is that I’m reviewing the pages I have. The ‘Film’ page is going to be deleted, as I hardly ever watch films anymore, and so is the ‘Music’ page, since I now use a scrapbook to keep track of the live shows I see.

Here are the some elements from those pages that I want to keep, preserved for posterity:

Films seen in 2016

Live Shows of 2016

All-Time Favourite Films

• The Princess Bride
• The Breakfast Club
• Almost Famous
• Stranger Than Fiction
• Ruby Sparks
• The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
• A Few Good Men
• The Big Lebowski
• Toy Story
• An Officer And A Gentleman
• Pride
• 10 Things I Hate About You
• Fight Club

My playlists can be found HERE on 8Tracks

Some of my favourite music

• Elvis Costello
• Hamilton! and show tunes in general
• David Bowie
• Bruce Springsteen
• Belle & Sebastian
• The Magnetic Fields
• Jens Lekman
• Taylor Swift
• The Arctic Monkeys
• The Smiths
• Elton John
• Billy Bragg
• The Clash
• The Dexys
• Fountains Of Wayne

I’m also giving up on challenges, except for the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge and the Goodreads Challenge 2019, which I will keep track of under the ‘Books’ page.

Challenges of 2017

Goodreads Challenge 2016

Feminism Reading Challenge 2016

LGBTQIA Reading Challenge 2016

That was all the admin for now, more content coming soon!