New Year's Day 2007 - Evening

Habits: This entry today has more to do with trying to establish the blogging habit than having anything to say. Except that facing this empty page and putting something down is at the heart of writing anything anytime. I would like my blog work to be part of capturing the best of what I have to say and that doesn't fit with sitting down to do this late in the evening when I can tell that my mind is starting to slow down for the day. I can already see that my musings here will dwell on the simple logistics for awhile. The missing days since my previous posting are, of course, connected to the holiday black-hole which sweeps you along into the various required events of the season.
Playing Well with Others: One of the things I am most determined to do is to begin to make connections with the world of the web. Mainly because I am intrigued by the possibilities and want to see where they lead. I started this blog thinking that one of the most important things to do is to place links inside my entries to pages that bear on the subjects I discuss. I want to indicate what other web pages seem most relevant to my personal concerns. I have pretty much only succeeded so far in linking to the David Weinberger site. [which I will not superfluously do again here. See my first entry.] This is an appropriate first choice because reading his book prompted me to jump into this. However, the fact that he somehow detected my link and responded to something I said has been very unsettling. My initial reaction was elation. It was thrilling to be taken seriously, especially about my ideas. Probably it was unlucky that our xmas travel occurred just then, with no convenient opportunity to blog and lots of time to stew. I am now a little spooked. I definitely feel a reluctance to be candid about my family members (most of whom I love very much). But during this past week even my ideas began to seem dangerous and exposure of them risky. I don't really know why. The actual facts of my daily life are pretty boring and I don't commit crimes or have any shameful vices except the reading of romance novels. But to come full circle, upon my return, I anxiously searched all my blog entries for comments only to find that there were none. So, as seems to be a pattern with the worries that I carry around with my like a tummyache, my journal here is essentially private, if only because it isn't very interesting to anyone else. And naturally, I am perversely annoyed with that thought and determined to find some way to be more interesting. Indeed more controversial.
Connections 2: This evening I spent some time on a safer mode of connecting with the web. I customized by Google Home Page to show me a few things about the world each time I log in. This is a simple webby thing to do that I have never before bothered with. I may find the NPR headlines and writers issues and art-work-of-the-day all a little tedious after awhile.
Reading: Reading books has been my main refuge since I was around nine or ten. During my idle moments (which I did not find nearly often enough) over the xmas holiday, I have been reading P.D. James latest novel The Lighthouse. I always get caught up in her stories and once again I am drawn back to this book. I'll be setting all the others I am reading aside, until I finish it. But with her books, this it is really an unwilling compulsion. I actually don't want to get mixed up further in the woes of her characters, but I will be. I have also read every novel by, say, Elizabeth George, and in her books, I am caught up in the lives of Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers and look to each book to further my time with them. The transitory characters that make up the plot of the particular story are not very compelling, or I guess, memorable, because I can't think of very many of them offhand. But not so with James. I find most of her characters kind of detestable and disturbing, but I don't easily forget them. In contrast to George, I find that Adam Dalgliesh doesn't like people intruding in his life and I feel sort of compelled to respect that. He shares only what he wants to. I also have to say that I never forget that James wrote a novel where the protagonist slept with her stepfather. I didn't like any of those characters and was pretty repulsed by the offhand ending which featured that little sexual tidbit. So I expect that I approach all of her novels with trepidation.
P.S. : Just noodling around, I found this blog and both the list of favorite novels read in 2006 and the comments she made about the books made this a must-link-to for me.