Today is the eighth birthday of Reader’s Diary. The previous review is the 500th book review I’ve written in that time. That’s 62.5 books a year almost evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction.
Reader’s Diary is probably the longest-lived unread blog on the Web, though at times the readership has jumped to as many as a half dozen. It’s a good thing that popularity wasn’t my aim. Reader’s Diary has achieved its goal, which is to help me keep track of the books I’ve read and to give me a way to exercise my atrophied writing skills. Its unintended effect has been to make me a more thoughtful reader, one more conscious of the writer’s craft. I’ve benefited from the effort I’ve put into it.