Hitting the reset button...

Well, it all seems to have gotten to be a little much for me -- this whole reading and then writing thing. Even the little slips of nothing that I would, though in later days only sporadically (at best!!), scratch out.

So I'm hitting the reset button.

The stacks and stacks of read volumes that were waiting to be "reviewed" here? All shuffled off to the basement. Prospects for future reviews? Bright. Bright indeed!! I just couldn't stare at those piles of books with post-it noted thoughts papering them, waiting, just waiting.

And it seems, thus, that I'm reading again. And that's the best thing of all.

So there will be reviews to come -- many, I trust -- though there won't be reviews of many of the marvelous, wondrous, horrible, and in many ways important books read of late:

• Blue Nights by Joan Didion
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez
• Stitches by David Small
• Leningrad by Anna Reid
• War by Sebastian Junger
• The Cardboard Valise by Ben Katchor

((All highly recommended, by the way!!))

Which is not to say that there isn't a backlog I will be working through, though those will mostly be in service of my love (and appreciation: celebratory & critical) of African poetry.

But more than anything I'm looking forward. A self-imagined blue screen of death has led me to ctrl-alt-delete my way to a new day and a fresh re-engagement with the stacks and stacks of as yet unread books. Good days ahead.