It is the case that writing reviews came to feel like a chore. The timestamps on each post reminded me just how long it had taken me to read a book, drawing rather painful attention to the fact that I no longer have as much free time, and that the free time I do have tends to be spent more on listening to podcasts. I have also had less time to devote to thinking about what I'm reading, so I began to feel uninspired when approaching a review. I did not know that I really had anything interesting to say. My tone seemed to shift from the enthusiastic, if not particularly skilled or knowledgeable, kid that I was when I started this blog to a tired, harried, slightly bored teenager distracted by the demands of her rigorous college-prep high school.
I still love to read. But I no longer devote to books and reading the same passion I did three years ago. A good indication of my current relationship with books would probably be the fact that I spend half an hour every week listening to the latest episode of Reading Glasses, a podcast "about book culture and literary life designed to help you read better" (in their words). (In fact, I'd say it has helped me read better because it brought me out of my book slump last July, and it never hurts one's own love of books and reading to listen to two cool ladies talk about books and reading in such enthusiastic, knowledgeable terms.) There are many things about which I have intense, complicated, frequent thoughts. But books are now rarely one of those things.
And so I find myself with little to say.
Maybe I'll come back and, instead of reviewing books, ponder a few choice observations I made while reading.
Maybe I shall expand IWMCW, make it more general. I could write about books and reading in general, about my own creative projects, about my English class. I could write about podcasts. I could post my take on truth and journalism, on linguistics, on semantics and pragmatics. I could explore books as art--literature. I could discuss labels. I could post my own essays and short fiction, and I could invite my friends to contribute. I could dive into philosophy of language, meaning, epistemology.
Indeed, in shifting books to the background, I may have made room to discover everything else in the world that concerns words.
As of now I do not yet know the future of IWMCW. All I know is that this was always supposed to be for fun, and I refuse to let it become anything else.