it’s been a couple months since we last spoke

Hi everyone,

It’s been a couple months since I was last seen “alive” on this blog or any of my social media platforms (except Twitter) and I know I haven’t been active in a while… so I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to all of you for ghosting this community. I have been meaning to come back to this very site to blog in a while but the timing didn’t feel right as my life was spiraling out of control due to lectures at university and examinations and reports to write and constant studying and stressing about what the future holds and anxious about what it doesn’t hold. Now that everything seems to have calm down slightly, I thought it would be a great time for me to be active again, but this time, with a different idea in mind.

You see, there’s another reason that I left the book community for a few months and the reason is that I wanted to gain new perspective by assessing on the rigid format that I used to write review and the obsession with stats. I wasn’t that obsessed with stats when I first started blogging because I didn’t really expect anything to come from it and all I wanted was to formulate an opinion on a book and share it with the world, but as this blog grew, I became obsessed with checking the stats every single day, and at the beginning, I didn’t know this was an obsession because everything was going smoothly until I noticed a few of the articles weren’t hitting a certain number of readers and I felt really upset by that and that’s when I knew it was becoming toxic for me, so I decided to leave for the time being.

As for the unmalleable review format that I was talking about earlier, I wasn’t having as much fun writing reviews as I used to and I felt pressured to write some of the reviews to churn out new content for this blog and that’s when I realized I was starting to abhor the review structure that I created since the inception of this blog as it felt really prosaic, deadpan, and immutable to me and this format of writing had restricted me from fully expressing my opinions on certain books.

So… I’ve been thinking of turning this around by composing articles on deeply analyzing a book, discussing specific section of a book in detail, and infusing spoilers into book reviews (with warnings intact). I would also like to abolish the format that I created by thinking out of the box and not stick to the ones that I already made for myself, so the reviews might sound or look different, but I assure you, it is still me. These articles might take some time to compose, so I apologize if I disappear again.

Thank you so much for sticking around and bearing with me!

Love, Max.