An Apology, and a Plan for 2024
Happy New Year! It’s been a while. As of today, I haven’t published anything on here since October. I’ve been busy making music, both for my school’s choir as an accompanist, which is a normal, reasonable thing to be distracted with; but the other kind of music I’ve been making is loud, noisy, repetitive techno music. The strangest thing is that, until about a few years ago, I didn’t even like electronic music all that much. Now I’m on YouTube, making my own cloddish attempts at composing, recording, mixing, and video editing the stuff.
Why? It’s simple: everybody is on YouTube! Coming from the desolate backwater of book blogging, I found myself gawping at the sheer size of crowds there like a yokel in Times Square. And the weird thing is, people there are actually nice! You can share a clip of your semi-modular bleeping and blooping and get real, insightful, friendly comments. You find yourself wandering into the kinds of independent forums, blogs, and trading groups that Big Tech supposedly gobbled up years ago. Coming from the anxious, paranoid, and elitist world of the literary internet (to say nothing of Substack and all its particular issues), it’s been a much more pleasant place on the internet to hang out, in a year when everybody else decided that the internet wasn’t fun anymore.
This doesn’t mean that I’m giving up on Musement and writing about books, but it does mean that in 2024 I’ll be writing less frequently (probably twice a month), and with much less interest in publishing, trending authors, and literary gossip.
My Year in Reading
Because of this plunge into music, I read a bit less than usual this year—76 full books, versus 109 last year. This is still well above the average (most Americans read five or fewer books a year), but assuming that total books read can stand in for reading time, that means I spent about 30% less time reading. That sounds right to me. I’m hoping to improve that for next year.
Looking over my logbook for the year, a few trends jump out: first, that I read a lot less fiction this year than in recent years; second, that I didn’t do nearly as many big reading projects this year; and finally, that the biggest trends in reading, by far, were religion and electronic music. The former made its way into several essays; the latter, so far, has not, though I think it might soon.
Since I’m not a professional book reviewer (thank God), I don’t put a special emphasis on new books, but here are some new(ish) books I read this year and would recommend:
The MANIAC, by Benjamin Labatut
What You Are Looking For Is In The Library, by Michiko Aoyama
Knowing What We Know, by Simon Winchester
The Gutenberg Parenthesis, by Jeff Jarvis
The White Mosque, by Sofia Samatar
My Year in Writing
Despite my apparent nosedive in writing since September, I actually ended up with more published essays in 2023 than I did in 2022. Some of that comes down to differences in output: in 2022 I spent a lot more keyboard time putting together link roundups. This year, I cut those back, and don’t regret it. Even with the recent slowdown and musical turn, I’m very proud of my writing this year. Here are a few of my favorites:
Next Year
I’ve revisisted my Substack Notes essay linked above several times this year just to keep in touch with my prediction that it would become a boring echo-chamber for spammy engagement-addicts peddling their dumb hustle-culture newsletters about the science of decision-making and maybe a few angry anti-woke-but-not-conservative writers who are still partying like it’s 2021 and…well, that’s pretty much what I see every couple of months when I check in. Then there’s that whole thing about Nazis, which, well, you either know or you can read about.
Substack, I’m sorry to say, has weird priorities surrounding the zombified corpse of Web 2.0 social media and the global fight against ethno-nationalism. It doesn’t seem to be any closer to reaching that wild nine-figure valuation it was getting a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem to be gaining many more high-profile writers who can pull of the rare con of getting fans to pay money for things that they like on the internet.
But Substack also makes a nice email newsletter platform that I enjoy using as both a writer and reader. I’m going to stick it out here, at least for a little while longer, and I’m going to keep writing.
See you next year.