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Two Years of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for about two years now. I was tempted to give a little summary or whatever at the end of the year, but on balance doing it now makes sense. At the end of any year, and especially one such as that which has just passed, there’s so much to go over that the development of a little blog really has no claim to anyone’s attention.

But what is exciting is that this blog is no longer just a little blog at all.

I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The blog has grown, massively, in relation to itself. As far as its relation to other book blogs goes, I have not the faintest idea of whether I’m doing well or badly here. Well, actually, I have the most recent version of the same survey that I mentioned when I posted one year ago. According to this, in some respects I’m doing quite well indeed.

One year ago, last January, I had 1078 views on the blog for that month, which worked out as 35 views a day. This month, still unfinished, sees me already at 2738 and with an average of 111 per day. This would put me in the top quartile by pageviews according to the survey. Last year, with the exception of a dip in February, every month was larger than the last. Things just built up, slowly but surely. As they should.

I shouldn’t worry about views, but I do enjoy thinking that people read my blog. Last year I had one follower – a friend. This year I have almost twenty, and almost all of them are unknown to me. The same is true of comments. I now have a few. Not a huge amount, but enough to be excited about. Engagement is what I’m after, really, with this blog. I want a place where people read and want to have their say.

Identity

But it is difficult, because the identity problems I mentioned last year are still present. What exactly is Mostly About Stories? I have long analyses, such as my pieces on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (still the most popular piece by far), short poems such as this one by Baratynsky, pieces focusing on a particular aspect of a novel like my thoughts on character in Nostromo, and more general pieces, like this one on Misotheism. It is perfectly reasonable for a blog to be varied in its contents. Just as Borges declared that Kafka created his own precursors, so too do I create my own readers. But that tension between a blog that’s a mess and a blog that’s held together by a unity – some stance, or perhaps my own character – is one that I’ve not resolved.

Even so, this year has been good for the blog’s “intellectual” development. I wrote some long pieces I had wanted to for a while, such as my thing on late Tolstoy, and some shorter more conversational pieces, like my thoughts on how many books to read. I wrote on books that I enjoyed, and on books that I studied, as usual. I do still struggle with knowing what to write. With a book that I’m studying, there’s always an element of teaching involved. I want my readers to learn something, and since the books can be obscure or not available in English, they perhaps do. But when it’s a book that everyone is familiar with, or a book that is long, I’m left flummoxed. Last year I read both War and Peace and Wuthering Heights and I had absolutely no idea what to say about them. Everything’s been said already.

This possibly reflects bad reading habits on my part. I’m not sure I quite “got” Wuthering Heights, though I did have stuff to say about it. But I think it also reflects an unwillingness to write shorter pieces. One thing that I’ve been somewhat adamant about in the past is that Mostly About Stories is for longer pieces, of around 1500 words or more. Yet sometimes I don’t have that much to say, or I want to focus on something small. I wanted to write about education in Wuthering Heights but didn’t know how to make it into a good enough size.

This is an idiotic stance to have. People’s attention drops off rapidly at about 1500 words anyway. Why force people to read more? Perhaps in the future I should aim for something like 1000-1500, but ensure the content is good and tight. Or perhaps I should just let each piece take its own length. All of these ideas have merit.

Reading

Last year, which I spent mostly in Russia with a little time in Cambridge at the end, was a good year for reading. John Williams’ Augustus and Butcher’s Crossing, Marilynne Robison’s Gilead, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Job, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps – all of these are books that have left their mark on me, by authors who were mostly new to me. Then there was Sally Rooney, who is exciting even as I’m somewhat ambivalent towards her work.

This year promises more discoveries. My degree at Cambridge finishes in the summer, leaving me for the first time in a very long time completely free to read whatever I want. It is a great opportunity, as well as a great burden. I am confident I will find something to read. I already have a lot of things I want to. Much more befogged lies my future beyond this blog. Do I get a job, do I do a master’s degree, do I run away into the mountains and become a full-time writer? All of these are possible, as are some less pleasant variants. Only time will tell which fate has decided for me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Come again.

Here’s a dreadful poem for your time:

I’d Rather (by Konstantin Balmont)

I wouldn't want to be a storm, 
There's too much thunder brewing there. 
I'd rather be the dew at dawn, 
Whose quiet peace knows no compare. 

I'd rather be a little flower, 
The kind whose bloom you barely see, 
The kind that spurns the thunder's power
To have its happiness, to be.

Many Books or Few Books?

I have a book buying problem. They arrive, four or five at a time, like clockwork several times a month. Books upon books upon books. There is nothing else, save transport or food, that I really spend money on. The main thing, anyway, is that the books keep coming. At home, the bookshelves of my “library” are overflowing, even with a good part of my collection still at Cambridge, and the floors of both that room and my bedroom are covered with books which only occasionally have consented to let me place them in boxes.

There is nothing wrong with buying books, especially when you read them, of course. I do not read all of the books that arrive, but I would say with cautious optimism that I read about a quarter of those that do. After all, in every case I ordered the books for a reason, so that even those books which I have passed over may continue to hope that I will yet turn to them and say: “well why don’t we finally get to know each other?” I am sure that Hume understands me when I ignore him to pick out a fiction writer, and that George Eliot approves when I turn to the Germans I write essays on instead of to Middlemarch. Their time will come. Well, maybe not Hume’s.

It is difficult to imagine how amazing my collection would be to someone even from just a hundred years ago. The sheer quantity of books is perhaps less impressive than their variety. I have books from hundreds and hundreds of authors, from all around the world, on topics ranging from poetry to history to oil extraction to the finer points of Eastern Orthodoxy. In the days before paperbacks, people had fewer books, and they also tended to have collected editions. When they read, it meant that they read deeply but not widely. They came to know authors, rather than books. These days, we invariably do the opposite.

Nostalgia, especially for what one hasn’t experienced, is a rather dangerous state of mind. But still I often find myself wishing I had fewer books. Even if we subscribe to the various dicta stating that the vast majority of books are rubbish, still there are far too many books to read in this life that common consensus could call amazing. Even if we dedicated our every waking moment to reading we would not even scratch the surface of all there is to read because to really understand the best books we often have to return to them several times, each time excavating a new layer of meaning.

What bothers me in this is that the thought that because there are so many good books, we have forgotten how to read them well. I understand how to read a book. The essays I write at university seem proof of this. But I generally feel like searching for themes when I read is a rather idiotic enterprise. I may find the themes, and I may even have interesting thoughts on them, but that doesn’t mean I understand the book in a deep sense and it definitely doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it. Books that we come back to, again and again, inhabit us like a kind of spirit. Books that we read, however intensely, on Friday for an essay due in on Monday, do not.

When I was hiking in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan I had only my Kindle with me, and though I had plenty of books on it too, I decided to focus on one – Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Perhaps it was the sheer contrast – of reading one of the world’s most urbane and “civilized” authors so far from anything that he would have recognised as civilization – but I really enjoyed the book. But more strangely, I also understood the book too, even though I was sleep-deprived and stressed. The limitations of the world around me allowed me to read the book as though it was the only book I had – to really care about what was written in it and to give the characters life within my head.

At home or at Cambridge, I am surrounded by books. And whether I want it or not, that fact influences how I read them. Even a book like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I am reading now, and which is designed to be read slowly, in fits and starts, I seem to be racing through, even though I am reading only a few pages each day. When it comes to a work of philosophy, like Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, which I ought be reading this month and in the next, then I know in advance that I am not going to understand a thing. I always have another book on my mind, distracting me from what’s at hand. Only non-fiction I can get something out of, since with such books one is often looking for facts more than anything deeper.

One of my favourite times is when I am forced to pack up my books, such as before I go on holiday or back to university. I enjoy packing my books up at such times precisely because I am forced to choose between them. I always have a secret hope that I will select few enough books as to be forced to really spend quality time with them. Each time I am disappointed. I end up ordering books, or else the remaining space on my Kindle starts rapidly diminishing. Try as I might, the desire to read many books outweighs my intention simply to read a few.

It has even started affecting my studies. To answer any of the questions on an exam paper I only need two or three texts – long or short, it does not matter. The questions are so predictable that one really can get by with only having read two texts for each question. I, however, have read far more than that, as my own posts on this blog in these past two years have perhaps indicated. It is now a question of forcing myself to cut down, to focus. If not on two or three texts, then at least on five or six, rather than fifteen.

Forcing myself to reread for the purposes of exams is not the route to a deep understanding or affection for a book either, but perhaps it will help me start on that path. However, I rather doubt that. In my experience, reading for any reason except to enjoy the book for itself makes it impossible to form a real connection with it. It’s a bit like loving a person. As soon as we’re using them for any purpose, however benign, we cannot love them anymore.

There is nothing wrong with reading so many books and ordering so many books except that it does perhaps betray a certain attitude towards life that is unhealthy if left unchecked. Wendell Berry likes to write about the need for limits and a life that has “form”. What he means is a life where we have lived well within certain bounds – mostly those of the community – without letting ambitions or our desires get the better of us, for in those cases our fates will inevitably be disappointment. A life that is focused on quantity, rather than quality, as so many of ours are these days, is a dangerous life because it leaves us no chance to be pleased with what we have. In trying to read everything we end up reading everything badly and nothing well. Books themselves become tools for sounding clever, rather than wise and lifelong companions.

I don’t know what the solution is to my problem. Perhaps I just need to stop buying books. Obviously, I do! I have tried, without much success, such solutions as only buying a new book after I have read an old one. And in recent months I have been reading more, so that the ratio of “read” to “unread” books is improving. But that still does not mean that I am reading well. Alas, time and time again I am reminded that reading is not just about dragging your eye from one side of a page to the other, but instead is an ability that can be made better and more effective with the correct frame of mind and environment.

In the end, I am left only with a kind of hope that once my studies finish and I am no longer obliged to read books, I may be able to read those books that I choose to read with a more honest eye. I imagine doing a master’s degree unrelated to literature somewhere far from my little library and taking only two or three books with me. Perhaps then I will finally read Middlemarch. Not for bragging rights, because I have read it once already, but for my soul, because back then I read it badly and can’t remember a thing. One can only hope.

Readers, what’s the solution?

One Year of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for just over a year, and it’s time for a little retrospective. I started the blog for a few different reasons. I was about to leave Cambridge and spend a year in Russia, and I would be losing the company of my dear friends Sophie and James, both of whom received the brunt of my reading reviews over dinner each day. I wanted to tell somebody – anyone really – about what I was looking at and what I thought of it. A blog has the advantage of eventually creating a little community around it, with regular commentators and a discursive atmosphere. This has not happened with Mostly About Stories yet, but perhaps it will one day.

Another reason was that I wanted to make sure I was writing. My creativity is fickle, but both from a literary and an academic perspective it makes sense for me to be regularly squeezing thoughts and words out of myself. The weekly/fortnightly deadline I set myself was successful in forcing me to write. It also forces me to think, just a little. Another, closely related, advantage is that of the reading I have done, much of it has been from my reading list for the next academic year, so writing about these books serves as a preliminary solidification in my memory of impressions and the early formulation of critical viewpoints.

It is funny how, as I began to see viewers come in, and then eventually began to see one or two of them stay, I started to be concerned about views. Initially I was writing for myself, on the whole. But once I had a little counter, like a budding little “influencer” I came to consider how to boost my popularity. Luckily, that desire is not too dominant. The fact is, if I wanted views I would need to focus on writing “analyses” and “summaries” of my reading list. In the end, the idea of making a small community of like-minded readers is more attractive, and although having some views are important in that – otherwise how will anyone find the blog at all? – a different style and some small degree of quality is more important.

But anyway.

What Went Right; What Went Wrong

So, as far as I understand it, the blog has not done badly in terms of views. After all, who reads these days? As the year went on, I got more and more of them – except for the final months. when university ended and people presumably had better things to do. Now that we are into January, things are picking up again, and I hope that the trend will continue once we get into February proper.

Not a disaster by any stretch. As the year progressed I had slightly more viewers than when I started!

I had a comment too! My review of Satantango had a comment by the translator. This was very exciting, because I’d liked the book a lot. Nonetheless, that’s one comment over the course of an entire year. I’d prefer to have more. Engagement is great, because it makes you – as the author – feel that people are at least reaching the end of your pieces. I have, as I imagine others do also, an instinctive distrust of Google’s Analytics, which although they are very detailed, paint a somewhat depressing view of how long people actually look at things. Or perhaps it’s just that my content isn’t good. Who knows?

The same situation holds true with my subscribers. Or should I say subscriber? The subscription box, much as is with the case with comments, isn’t easy to locate, and I imagine confirming an email subscription takes a lot of effort – I know I’d hardly do it myself. But still, it would be good to have at least one more subscriber, and ideally someone I didn’t actually know in real life.

A Bit of Data

Mostly About Stories is a book blog. I dropped maths as early as I could, and although I like it, nonetheless it is one of my weaker areas. Still. Here are some statistics for you.

In 2019 I had 4635 views from 3336 unique visitors, 2 comments, and 1 subscriber. By the end of the year, in October and November, I was averaging 35 views a day. On my best day I had 96 views – that day was also my birthday, funnily enough – but as most of the views were on my article about Walter Benjamin this seems a simple coincidence. At the time of writing there are 37 posts on the blog, which is pretty good going. I only once took a break between posts of longer than two weeks (my stated schedule in the about page).

For a book blog this may be good, but probably isn’t. My only real source of data is this page.

Concerning the Writing

Of course, it’s all well and good to look at metrics and think of plans, but really the heart of any blog is its content. Mostly About Stories is dominated, in its views, by my piece on Walter Benjamin’s the Storyteller (see above). Next to that is my translation of Kafka’s Before the Law, and my essay on Gogol’s The Nose. But everything that I’ve written, almost without exception, has had a viewer or two. That makes writing them worthwhile, as it’s often the less well-known things that I’m most excited to share with people.

My favourite pieces on the blog, or at least the ones I feel most proud of, are likely Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, and Valentin Rasputin’s Money for Maria. I also quite like my translations of Theodor Storm’s poetry.

I do admit that this blog probably lacks a coherent identity. It’s basically just me reading literature, mostly from my reading lists, and writing about it. I quite like the idea, going forward, of being a bit more disciplined with my post lengths. I read somewhere that viewer attention drops off rapidly once a post goes over 1700 words, and I want to make that my target. Something should be not too long, but also sufficiently in-depth as to be interesting. That would be good.

Steps Forward and Goals for 2020

I recently changed the theme of Mostly About Stories. I think it looks better now. It makes the text easier to read and has a bit more of a modern feel to it.

I’d like to have a few more comments, maybe another subscriber, before this year is over. All that would be good. Perhaps I should be like those annoying YouTubers who end every video begging us to like and subscribe? It’s a difficult balance to get and I tend to hope any readers who want to comment will comment without prompting, but perhaps I should try to be a little more pushy?

Anyway, I hope you found this look at one year of Mostly About Stories to be slightly entertaining. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a comment about how I can improve the blog going forward! 😊