On this day last year I began posting every day for 39 days to commemorate 39 years since I began reading books. I dug out a folder of book lists I'd kept since 1986, chose one book from each year that I'd not written about before and wrote what ever the book suggested to me. Most of it came easily but a problem arose when I reached the mid-nineties. I discovered there were no paper records of what I'd read from 1996 to 1999. This threatened to end the project just as it was gaining momentum. I was dismayed because I have never stopped making the lists. Where had they gone?
It turned out that technology had disrupted the tradition. I had saved Word documents onto a floppy disk and had not printed them out, and now had no means of accessing the contents. Salvation arrived when I realised I could search old diaries for mentions of books I had been reading. I could also check the inside pages of books for dates of acquisition written on the inside cover – a practice I stopped along with writing a diary soon into the new century.
Perhaps it would have been better for my self-esteem to have stopped the project too. This Space has never had many visitors so I thought adding quantity to quality would change that. It did: the viewing figures plummeted. I had hoped the book blogging community would respond with surprise and enthusiasm, perhaps with its own OuLiPo-like projects, or at least showing an interest in certain books discussed along the way, but of course there is no book blogging community (not anymore). In consolation, I discovered that committing to post every day was its own reward. The relentless schedule gave shape to otherwise empty days, reminding me of the cycling routine I once kept traversing the rolling hills of the Sussex countryside such as the one below.
The reason why the days were empty and I was able to commit to the work was also due to technological disruption and will be the subject of a forthcoming post. The exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the last eighteen months has wiped out the job role I had had for fourteen years in an industry in which I have worked for thirty. This is why I have added a variant on the 'Buy me a coffee' button to the top of the page. In the twenty years of writing This Space, I have neither used advertising nor asked for support, so please try to ignore the stain on the page.
Meanwhile, if you need an essay, thesis, non-fiction book, short story or novel proofread for a very modest fee, do get in touch. A fellow worker wrote that I am "the best proof reader l've met and he finds everything". (Of course, 'proof reader' should be one word and the 'and' would be better replaced with an em-dash or semi-colon.) My motto is ATTENTION TO DETAIL IS PARAMONT.
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