Brief Blog Update: I continue to upload reviews from the now defunct New York Journal of Books. I’m a little more than halfway through the project. On irregular occasions, I will upload around a dozen or more reviews. I’m currently putting up reviews that went live in 2015. All told, I have around 141 reviews for the New York Journal of Books. It is a slow, rather tedious, but necessary, process. I’m doing it at my pace. In the end, since I’m doing this on my free time, I want to avoid it becoming too much like work. (I have a full-time job, so free time is precious to me.)

Between weekly chores, consuming entertainment from streaming services, and enjoying the warm weather (while it lasts), what seems like ample time on the weekends can get whittled down rather quickly. As important as this project is to me, I don’t want to spend every free moment copy and pasting files on to a blogging platform. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I do have a life.

The Challenge of Digital Preservation: That being said, this uploading is important to me, and, I assume, to you, the reader. It did come as a shock when the New York Journal of Books closed its doors and all those reviews vanished into nothingness. (Perhaps some got captured by the Wayback Machine, but I don’t know for sure.)

This process, as mentioned above, involves copying and pasting old physical files on to this blogging platform. In the past, I had submitted MS Word documents to the reviewing website and they uploaded them on to their platform. Now I am doing the same. In the spirit of the reviewing process, I am uploading them unaltered. So they appear, warts and all. Reviews are noteworthy because of their temporal nature. They are immediate commentary, opinion, and emotions about a product (in this case, books) that were released now. But, as time passeth, the now has become preserved in amber. What was once an immediate reaction is now a historical relic. This blog itself is a bit of a historical relic, having begun in the bygone era of 2009. Activity has waxed and waned, but it has always been around.

This review uploading project has been part of a larger trend of digital preservation. While there is the old saying about everything being preserved on the Internet, the opposite is also true. When something vanishes from the Internet, is ceases to exist. This project attempts to reverse that trend. These reviews, once on the New York Journal of Books website, vanished. I have saved all my reviews and am currently working to put them back online. I’d say “for the greater good,” but that’s overselling it and sounds like a humblebrag. It is less about that and more about useful information being made freely available. I believe these reviews are, at very least, useful. They are my opinions about books. So hopefully if you are in a bookstore and/or library and you see a title you’re curious about, you can find a useful review about it.

No paywalls. No clickbait.

The reviews from the New York Journal of Books were truthful, objective, and brief. Ranging from 500 to 2k words, they offer information for potential readers. This information is useful in two ways. First, if you wish to purchase a book, this review will help in making that financial decision. Second, and perhaps more important, is making the decision of whether or not one wants to spend the time reading the book. It’s one thing to lose money on a bad purchasing decision. One can always off-load a book to a used bookstore or thrift store. One can at least get a smidgen of monetary return in the process. It’s quite another thing to realize you’ve wasted your time reading a book. You can’t get that time back. Time is precious. If some book isn’t for you, don’t read it.

With that statement, let me refine it. This isn’t simply about a book one doesn’t like. I’m no fan of The Great Gatsby or Atlas Shrugged, but I do think they are both worth reading. At root of this is, beyond the intellectual brain-suck of social media, is that high school English classes seemed designed to make a student hate reading. I did enjoy reading Charles Dickens, but reading Hard Times felt like a visit to the dentist. So, read what you like, but also don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. Read beyond your own culture, socioeconomic income level, and political ideology. If you’re a committed leftist, read some Ayn Rand and Roger Scruton. Some will take a passive and mushy reasoning and talk about being well-rounded and tolerant and whatnot. Sure, fine, whatever. But, a major part of reading beyond one’s own ideology is knowing all their arguments, finding the foundational bedrock of those arguments, and then figuring out a plan of surgical demolition. Heck, the Right does it to the Left all the time.

But back to the topic at hand: Reading is pleasurable. Given that both Right and Left have a nasty penchant for banning things they don’t like, read some banned books. This uploading project is about making as much useful information freely available. Am I doing it for the clicks? Maybe, but that’s not the over-arching impetus. If it was, I would be more engaged with LibraryThing and Goodreads. I could probably upload more reviews on to those platforms, but I’m interested in doing that right now. In the future, maybe? But to what end? Clicks? Likes? In the end, it just sounds like more work. As the song goes, “I’m working for the weekend.” Leisure is important. Pleasure is important. So often we get seduced into concepts like industriousness and utility. Yes, this project is about information’s usefulness, but this comes from a personal philosophy of hedonism. I’m a pragmatic hedonist, if that makes any sense to our American capitalist death-kulture? Go on, take pleasure from these reviews. Knowledge is power, but knowledge also feels good.

So read these reviews. And you know the Benediction. Say it with me: “Like, comment, and subscribe.” Or the original from 12 Monkeys: “Kneel, pray, commercials!”