Preface

I started a blog about my experiences with literature in 2010, but when writing it I felt even then that my reasons for doing so were based in self-promotion and vanity. This is evident in the way that I talked about books that I had read. I wrote about books from the canon as if they were obscure, and that through my insight they would be given the credit they deserved. I thought it would have the same success as http://anobservist.blogspot.co.uk/ which saw its author, a dear friend of mine, go to the Venice Film Festival through the strength of her blog. Sadly I did not, and I didn't carry on writing it. A brief stint as literature editor of [SMITHS] saw me write a few more articles, and I enjoyed seeing them in print, but I look back at them and realise that they were flip, they were glib, they were journalism.

I begin again, hopefully with a humbler tone and a more honest approach to what I experienced, rather than writing something which simply reinforces the criticism that comes hand in hand with the novel. Though I'm also aware it would be similarly damaging to ignore this. What I write may be banal or insightful, juvenile or academic. It may even be educational to some, at least I hope to impart some wisdom however useful it may or may not be. But really the aim of my blog is to further engage with what I had just read, rather than to gloss over it. Arguably the introspective agenda may be said to hark back to my previous experiment, but I'm a little older and experienced now, and I am more conscious of what I write. I'm relying on this awareness to displace the pompous style which plagued my last blog.

Unfortunately It may be a while until I can do this completely independently; I have just started an MA in literature at the University of Birmingham and so a considerable amount of what I write about will be from the reading list and will quite possibly reek of rehashed criticism from seminars, and not really comment upon anything other than literature from 1880-1940. But hopefully not all… no, not all indeed.

@ConsolationLit