(20 years of blogging)

Today marks my 20th year of blogging. 

I really can't believe it: It seems like just a few years ago that I started this blog. But then again, "blog" seems so 2000s, doesn't it? Throughout the years, I have thought about moving this blog to Facebook (when I was on it), to Medium (when that platform was hot), and to other platforms that had more traction and active development. But I've held steady here at Blogger, and it's nice to have accumulated a huge archive of book reviews on one platform.

That's always been the raison d'etre of this blog: to capture my insights from the books I read. As a new assistant professor in 1999, I found that I would read a book, be excited about its insights, return the book to the library -- and a few months later, I couldn't remember the insights, or I would remember them but not where they came from. This was no way to live. So I started keeping notes on my readings, and in 2003, I began posting them to the blog. 

My very first review was mainly written as I was waiting in line for tickets to The Matrix: Reloaded at the Alamo Drafthouse. That movie was a real disappointment, but the blog wasn't. After compiling a few reviews, I found that I could

• capture insights adequately
• search the blog for insights ("Where did Latour say X? Who talks about topic Y?")
• capture quotes that I know I want to use in papers, so I don't have to retype them
• capture thoughts that I might use in literature reviews later (I regularly copy-paste from my blog to my lit reviews)
• share book summaries with students and colleagues so that they can quickly decide whether to read the book or not

The blog, in other words, has really supercharged my writing and scholarship by allowing me to capture my efforts. But I can also see my growth as a scholar as I read across these reviews. Every once in a while, I review a book a second or third time, highlighting different insights -- and sometimes reviewing a book more fairly than the first time.

Apparently it's been helpful to others as well. One friend of my wife's reported that she was trying to get her head around Bakhtin, googled his books, and found my blog. "Clay Spinuzzi saved my life!" she said in what I'm pretty sure is an exaggeration. Similarly, some of our HDO students read Deleuze & Guatarri in another class, looked for an explainer, and found my review. I didn't anticipate the blog working in that way, but I'm glad it does.

One downside is that I am always behind on blogging. I'm about six books behind right now, mainly because I have been having to prioritize other writing commitments. But those books are sitting on a specific shelf at home, so I won't forget them, and I promise I'll get to them. Soon.

In any case, I am thankful for the decision that I made 20 years ago. I plan to retire around 2035, so hopefully we'll make it to a 30th-year anniversary too.