Peg Kerr's Journal

As you may have ascertained from last week's collage, Checklist, I have things to do. SO many things to do.

But it is very difficult because all I want to do is bury myself in a book and read.

As I have mentioned before, I am an avid reader (I've already read thirty-seven books this year. Not quite a book a day, but close). I live in a house absolutely surrounded by books--Rob was a HUGE collector. Our mutual love of books was one of the things that made us enjoy each other's company so much.

And despite being surrounded by shelf after shelf of lovingly collected books, many of them autographed, I have been transitioning to reading books on digital devices (sorry, Rob). I find it more convenient when I am on the go, as I can easily switch from one book to the next (without having to go home to get another one off the shelf). And I like reading in bed at night. A digital device works best when you are reading in the dark.

And because I am such a huge reader, I made a decision that I struggled with quite a bit.

Yes, people, I am sorry. I went over to the dark side.

*Hangs her head*

I bought a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

I have also started using Goodreads. At first, I just used it to log my books. I was genuinely startled to find out how many books I was actually reading.

Then I started paying attention to the friends feature. I was reading in one small genre slice (Jane Austen fanfiction) and I kept seeing the same names of people over and over again reviewing the kind of books I liked. Tentatively, I followed a few of them.

And then a whole new world opened up to me: I discovered notes and highlights.

Now understand: Rob was a book collector, and that meant a few rules if we wanted to live in peace together in the same household: No cracking the spine by carelessly leaving a book open facedown, no bending page tips to mark one's place. And most importantly, BOOKS WERE NOT MEANT TO BE WRITTEN IN. AT ALL.

I'd seen dotted underlines in books that I read on Kindle Unlimited but I didn't pay much attention until I started seeing notifications in my feed on Goodreads that people I had friended had left notes and highlights on books that I had often read myself.

I have been reading for probably over fifty-five years. I have been in book clubs and book manuscript critiquing groups. But this has opened up a conversation about books that I have never experienced before: I am getting to read the line-by-line reactions of people to books that we are both reading. I love it. It's WONDERFUL. It is making me engage in textual analysis in a way I never have before.

I never wrote notes in books, unless it was a manuscript I was critiquing. But a published book? Never, never, never. But last week I wrote about sixty notes in a book. And I am eager to see how people will react.

It's like the world that opened up to me when I went from the daily paper journal that I kept for just myself for thirty-five years to online blogging--and suddenly I started getting comments and reactions back to what I wrote.

This was a fun collage to do, and I quite like it. I went looking for a picture of a woman in Regency dress, reading (because Regency is the sort of fiction I am reading right now). Here is the orginal picture: A Quiet Read by William Kay Blacklock. I have been using some new digital tools, and I am pleased with what I accomplished. I put my own portrait, my photo icon from Goodreads, over in the oval tambour frame on the side. (The book against my cheek is my prized edition of Pride and Prejudice that aome gave me).

A poised young woman in Regency dress sits on a small loveseat with her feet on a footstool, reading a book. Behind her floats the open pages of a book, with marginalia written throughout. Superimposed over the book are the words "View your notes and highlights." To the side of the loveseat, on the right side of the collage, is an oval tambour frame. An oval picture of Peg's face with a book against her cheek (her Goodreads icon) is superimposed over the tambour frame.

Marginalia



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

I got an email from LiveJournal noting that April 27, 2022 is the 20th anniversary of my setting up my LiveJournal.

So I've been thinking about this, and about what starting to blog on LiveJournal and later Dreamwidth opened up in my life.

As I had noted in my very first entry, I had kept a daily personal journal for 25 years at the time I started my LiveJournal. So I was very familiar with the process of writing about my life.

What was different and what proved to be almost seductive was that for the first time in 25 years, I got reactions to what I was writing.

I wrote about my family, about parenting, about my fandom obsessions, about writing, about my struggle to cook for my family. I wrote about politics. I wrote about all our family rituals (May Day, 12th Night, etc.). I wrote about my karate journey, from white belt to black belt. I wrote about depression. I wrote about whatever I was thinking about. Eventually, I wrote about Rob's illness and death.

Twenty years ago was a more innocent age, and I would probably make different decisions about how frankly I spoke about things if I had known then what I know now when starting to write. But for the most point, opening my life in this way has been a blessing, and I have made so many remarkable friendships. Online friendships ARE real ones.

The background of the collage includes text from my very first entry, and the color green is the green I used in all the icons I created. Otherwise, it shows various things that have cropped up in my journal over the years. I certainly didn't have room to include them all. I think I may create a separate Soulcollage card for "Blogger." Edited to add: And I have done so, here.

Blogging



Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 gallery.

Wow, there are a lot of really talented fan artists in this fandom. And it's so much fun to see the story interpreted through so many different people's eyes.




And the epilogue: