In Which A Mission Is Modified

I'd originally planned to post this at some point in the first half of January, but sort of ran out of time. I'm going to be trying to pay more attention to the blog again starting... NOW!

The "Classic" reviews are finally all done, so I know you're all dying to find out what happens next. Am I going to get off my lazy ass and start reviewing some romnovs again, or am I going to be a big baby and cease and desist?

The short answer to that question is that yes, I am going to start up the romnov side of the project again. However, it's going to look a lot different.

The logistics are basically that the category romance novels are only going to make up four out of every ten of what I'm going to call "the R books." There are a vast number of reasons for this, but I'm going to give you two of them.

First, although I've concluded that I'm not doing anything wrong by approaching these books with an eye for snark, I do want to start being a lot more careful about it. And when I say "careful," I mean that I need to make a better case for how awful these things tend to be, using examples from the text and so on, in an effort to give due respect to the creators. I hope that doesn't sound overly lame.

Second, not only do I have better things to do with my time than writing romnovs, I have better things to do than reading them. When I started the project I was an unemployed loser with lots of time to waste on this sort of thing i.e. reading novels that I would otherwise avoid at all costs. If at some point I fit that description again, I'll certainly increase the proportion of romnovs included in the R books. Now, however, I have a full time (and potentially full time PLUS) job, and I just can't do that.

Therefore, the rest of the R books (in each set of ten) will now consist of:

• 1 old romance novel
• 1 new, non-category romance novel
• 4 random novels because My Reading List Is Too Damn Long

Lest you think I'm being too dismissive about this, please don't! Even though I don't really have time to give this post the attention it deserves (whereas I honestly spent an entire day on the one that started it all), I've really spent tons of time thinking about this over the past several months.

Also note, with regard to My Reading List being Too Damn Long, I'm also going to take the liberty of reading some non-fiction. None of that will be making its way into the list of R books, but I may mention it from time to time, in supplementals. This might also be a good time to mention that while this is unquestionably a litblog, I consider things like relationships, gender, and the engineering profession to be relevant secondary topics, and my ponderings on those things will probably show up from time to time.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that right now, I just can't stick to a standard schedule when it comes to the reviews. As I've hinted at a bit, A Bend in the River took ages to read, and the next couple books are over 500 pages long (not astronomical by any means, but still a bit on the long side to finish in one month in addition to everything else I'm doing). I'm going to do my best to post something every ten days or so, but I just can't manage the reviews. My endless apologies, yet again.

Anyway, for the moment, since I haven't read any romnovs recently and I'd really like to finish out this set of ten with just random stuff, I'm going to post the two reviews that I'd written before the fiasco as the next two R books. The first of these should be going up within the next few days, possibly with some further commentary from me. The "old romance novel" for this set of R books is a French novel that I read in translation. It counts because one of the books on The List, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, is actually a translation from German. And I still haven't started reading Angle of Repose.