No longer the everyman

Thinking about what this blog should be about has lef me to a few possible options. When I was a child I remember going into a stamp shop and telling the man behind the counter that I enjoyed collecting stamps. He asked which ones and I replied "All of them". He then laughed and said that most serious collectors specialised in one country or one period and that although my collection was a good one for a young boy it lacked any focus.

I often think of that same conversation when I think of this blog. At the start the idea was that I would record all the books I read. The broad remit was that after years of just reading non-fiction there was a lot of catching up to do and so I would pick up some of the greats and get thoughts down on those. It was also an attempt to try and capture thoughts that would otherwise have been lost as a result of my leaky memory.

But there are various problems being an everyman blog. It leaves you often without direction, makes it hard to engage with a specific online community and prevents any great analysis from ever developing as you jump from genre to genre and period to period without enabling too much comparison.

So thinking about what I like to read a lot there are a couple of stand out options:

Russian literature and history has always been a passion of mine and I would be happy to go down that route. Pros are that it would keep me entertained for a long time. Cons are that the books tend to be fairly gloomy and I'm not sure a sustained diet of Russian lit would be good for the soul.

History, specifically modern, is something that I have studied in the past and there is plenty of material here. The Pros are that you can really get stuck into some interesting things, like my current interest in the Vietnam War. The Cons are that the books tend to be long, dense, not always that well written for the lay reader and can be hard to share.

IThe third choice is of course to combine the two but I'm not sure how that would work.

Plenty of food for thought there and I hope to make a decision soon and change the blog strapline and get a more coherent focus.