Books and updating

This is a two-in-one post concerning recent book purchases and the time I have to update this blog, so feel free to skip the bit you’re not interested in.

Books

If you know me personally, then one thing that you should already be aware of is that I love reading, and not only that, I love reading actual honest-to-betsy pulped wood books. However, the past six months has, for various reasons, seen me buy hardly any books.

It’s not that I thought there weren’t any worth buying/reading, but simply a case of needing to manage my cash-flow in a rather diligent manner. However, my finances are returning to a more reasonable level of sanity and, while not going overboard, I did have a little bit of an accidental splurge after making the mistake of popping into Waterstone’s.

Today’s purchases are The Rough Guide to the Brain by Barry J Gibb (I presume not of BeeGee fame, but am happy to be corrected), and The Tipping Point and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

The latter two, while by the same author, were bought otherwise independently. I’d had Blink recommended by a friend, and I just happened to like the look of The Tipping Point and didn’t actually notice (or care) who the author was.

While none of these new titles have any particular focus that is directly apropos of this blog, they are concerned with science and critical thinking respectively and do have something of an oblique relevance.

I have, however, had a chance to read a number of the titles on my to-read pile, and so will be shortly updating my book list. Feel free to drop a comment with your own recommendations for new titles that you don’t see there. For any ‘helpful’ theists out there, yes, I already have a couple of bibles and a koran (as well as various others bookmarked on the web) so there’s no need to suggest those.

Updating

As some of you may have noticed (if you haven’t already completely abandoned reading this blog) I’ve been a bit slack on keeping the place up to date and otherwise generally ship shape.

Sorry about that.

Well, not really. I do realise that this is my blog, and I’m free to update (or not) as often (or infrequently) as I desire (or are able).

By way of (a rather weak) explanation, I’ll iterate as to why I’ve been a bit crap in this regard over the past few months.

1) Time, or lack thereof. I’ve been very busy recently with a variety of things. One of the primary ones was studying with the OU. Another was catching up with a social life that I’d all but neglected for far too long. Yet another was a need to take on extra freelance work (mostly to pay for the studying and social life).

I remained as a low-key activist for secularism and humanism in the background, but my “public” persona in the form of this blog lost out. Things have somewhat improved on this front, and I now have a little more free time.

2) Competition, too much of. Well, not really, but I’ll make this a bit clearer. Over the past couple of years since I started this blog, the atheist community of the web has grown at a rate that I would never have foreseen. This is A Good Thingâ„¢ in my book, and I’m most certainly not complaining. However, there’s only so much news about religious privilege and other wingnuttery impelled on the UK citizenry¹ to go around, and the number of peer blogs (which I still read, when I can) has exploded.

Aggregators like Planet Atheism seemed to be filled, it has to be said, with several observers to the exact same phenomenon, and I didn’t feel like I was contributing anything new to the mix. So I let others post to their blogs, and kept my own counsel, more often than not because I agreed with them, and “I agree” posts or comments to me seem inadequate and insipid. I lost a fair chunk of my blogging mojo.

Yet, over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed things that seemed to have slipped through the general atheist/humanist/secularist radar, or at that part of it that I keep a beady eye on. So, as I have a bit more time to devote, I plan to update this blog more often, picking up the slack where I see it. And you can expect me to be, as I was previously, pointing and laughing at stupidity, denouncing undeserved religious privilege, vilifying bad science and other woo and generally making a nuisance of myself to the otherwise magically inclined.

For some reason, I have the immortal words of Randy Quaid’s character in Independence Day in my head: Hello boys, I’m back!

1. the main focus that I have on this blog [↩]

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4. Tidying up ...
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