Outed

I'd like to thank (?) author, local celebrity and all-around good chap Rob Wiersema for outing me last night at book club. Rob, we really appreciated your attending, and I think I speak for the rest of the mook club when I say that you're welcome to come by even when we're not discussing your book.

I've been doing this blog for about 18 months now, but I've deliberately kept it apart from my daily life. It's about the books. I read a lot, and I talk about literature a lot in class here at the university, but these are different literatures, and I wanted to find a way to talk about what I like to read. That was one reason for setting up the mook club, too: to talk about books with people who aren't expecting a grade just for listening to me.

This started out purely as a record of book purchases, but I started adding comments on books I've read because my recollection of detail becomes increasingly weak as time goes on -- I remember how I felt about a book, and what I got out of it, but I lose touch with what happens in it. (As I demonstrated last night by forgetting that James Earl Jones' fictional novelist in Field of Dreams was named in the WP Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe as actual novelist JD Salinger....) This gives me a way to keep track of my own thoughts, in other words, and it turned out that the hype was correct: even without actual readers, there's a sense of obligation to keep writing that isn't there in a private diary, failed versions of which litter the years behind me.

As I say, this began anonymously, but genies and bottles, I guess -- unless what happens at book club stays at book club?