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Stats and introductions May 21, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in this blog.
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Despite knowing how shallow it is, I do check how many visitors I’ve had and am excited to have passed the 30 000 mark yesterday! (If only my next book sells this many.) Thanks to you for stopping by. (The counter can be seen in the sidebar.)

In celebration, I would love to meet more of you – why not leave a comment introducing yourself if you haven’t made yourself known yet, or even if you have already made yourself known? Let me know your interests, the things you wish I’d write about more or write about less, and feel free to promote your blog or your book or your manifesto.

Subscriptions made easier April 9, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in news, this blog.
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Sorry, this is just a maintenance announcement (and one duplicated from my other blog at that). But a potentially helpful one!

I’ve just added two subscription buttons that if you’re observant you might have already noticed in the right hand column.  You can now get new posts sent to your email inbox or to your RSS feed aggregator. (If you don’t know what the latter is, you should probably go for the former.)

PS: the new post is coming at 3pm. This isn’t it. It’s a much longer, more interesting one.

Going regular April 2, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in news, this blog.
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Deadlines are good things. And so is being regular.

So from now on, this blog will be updated every Thursday at 3pm WST (+8 GMT). (There may be additional posts through the week, but there will be at the minimum a post at this time.)

Some of these posts, I can just imagine now, will be short. But it is my aim to never waste your time, dear reader.

Here and there and everywhere. April 20, 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in reading, reading report, this blog.
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First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone – I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century – that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

 

Welcome to my blog June 3, 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in this blog.
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For a couple of years I blogged voraciously at nathanhobby.modblog.com. Then modblog went down about a year ago and it all disappeared. I don’t want to be dramatic, but I guess that gave me a bit of a taste of what will happen when I die. All those memories and words and pictures go with me. (At least as far as I’m concerned.)

 I blogged about everything in the one place – theology, quotes, reading, my writing, my personal life. I think the end result of that is that I really limited my readers. So now I’ve got heaps of blogs with quite specific focuses. So that people who want to read the quotes I’ve collected don’t have to read about a great recipe I found or that I thought The Others was a waste of time the other night.

 I don’t know if this new approach will work or not. I’m not going to have the time to blog like I once did; it stopped me working on my novel.

At the moment, I’m sort of between novels, so maybe I’ll have time to blog.