New Directions

I've been thinking a lot about this space over the past month. What I want to do with it, and even if I want to keep it going. I've decided that my sporadic postings are due, at least in part, to a real lack of focus or structure in what I write about. To help combat this I'm going to lay in some more purposeful structure to what I put here.

To start with, I'm going to pick an author and deal with his or her full set of novels and/or story collections, one at at time, in the order they were published. I considered a pretty big number of authors: Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Jeanette Winterson, Jane Bowles, William S. Burroughs, David Mitchell, and on and on. I even considered some long-running comic book series like Y the Last Man and Cerebus. In the end I picked Paul Auster; he's a writer I enjoy and respect, but have only read about a third of his published fiction. I own his first two books, and the others are pretty readily available at the library I work at. I also have a feeling there might be an interesting progression throughout his work.

Auster's first book is a set of three novellas; originally published separately they are now sold as his New York Trilogy. The goal right now is to have something written about the first novella on February 1, and follow with the other two novellas over the following two weeks of the month. We'll see how it goes.

I still plan on reviewing newer material and interspersing it with my usual rants, but I'm hoping this will make things more interesting for both me and the readers out there.

Excelsior