I'm inaugurating a new reading project for vestige.org. It will be independent of Reading 2008 and subsequent related projects. It's called The Long Read. There are a number of books in my stack that I've wanted to read for years, but have put off because they are daunting either intellectually or by virtue of their extreme length (or both). There aren't many of these books, but they could take months or perhaps even a full year to read and therefore don't fit well into my Reading 2008 project, nor my policy of reading only one book at a time. I'm talking about books like The Anatomy of Melancholy or In Search of Lost Time. What I propose is this: alongside my regular reading, I will read one of these long, daunting books. Rather than posting a single review after reading the book, I will post periodic reports, including interesting quotations and my thoughts on the process of trying to engage with such heavy reading material and how, or even if, the extended duration of that engagement might affect my thoughts and feelings about the material. If that sounded convoluted, I suppose you might just say that I'll be blogging about a big, difficult book alongside my regular reading list.

The first book I've chosen for The Long Read is Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. I've been interested in this book since taking a class in 1999 with Canadian author Eric McCormack (The Dutch Wife, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Mysterium, etc), in which he spoke extensively about writing his thesis on The Anatomy. I picked up the NYRB edition in 2001, and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since, glanced at but never opened seriously. With one or two exceptions, I've never been a fan of pre-Victorian prose, so I don't anticipate a smooth ride with Mr. Burton. I'm hoping that my natural affinity for the topic will sustain me. These lines from William H. Gass' introduction give me some hope:

The analytical outline should not daunt. Burton pays as much attention to his own schematisms as he pays to the syntax of his sentences. Imposing indeed are his interconnections, but it is rather as if a net had been flung down on top of fish who continue to roil and flop freely about beneath it.

So here's hoping this works out. I don't think I've ever been so intimidated by a book in all my life.

The problem with the comments has been fixed. Because I'm quick like that. If you've previously visited individual entry pages on vestige.org, it would be a could idea to do a refresh before you write your comments, as the problem was with a faulty template, the data for which might still be in your cache (and for some reason still affects the comments—wonders never cease).

It has come to my attention that there is yet another problem with the commenting system (MovableType seems to fail more or less at random, after working properly without issue for months or years at a stretch), and every single comment is now appearing on this entry, no matter what entry the poster actually intended to comment on. I won't have time until later tonight, or possibly tomorrow, but I hope to have it corrected quickly.

Anyone who may have tried to contact me via email over the last twenty-four hours more than likely found that they could not. Due to some inbox weirdness, I was able to send but not receive email until early this afternoon. All the messages I was sent during this period were lost; you will have to send them again. The problem seems to have been resolved, so things should go back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

After sitting on the idea for a couple of months, discussions like this one have finally forced me to draft a book review policy. It's kind of wordy, but I think it covers everything I wanted to say. If I find that I need to make some adjustments later on, I'll post about it here. So: authors, publishers and publicists, if you have a book that you'd like me to review, get the skinny here. I'd love to hear from you.

It was brought to my attention earlier today that my RSS feed has been acting up. In the sense that it hasn't been working. It turns out that this is probably my fault; I reconfigured some things the last time I updated my MovableType installation (not recently, but I guess this has been going on for a while), and it looks like that broke the RSS feed. The old RSS feed was at http://www.vestige.org/index.rdf; this no longer works, and I can't figure out how to make it work. But it turns out that if you point your feed reader to http://www.vestige.org/index.xml, everything will work just fine (although I haven't done anything to the template, so it probably won't look very pretty in your reader—if that sort of thing is even an issue; I don't really know much about RSS, as I don't use it myself). Sorry about the mix up.

After eight consecutive hours of sweating over code, I've managed to not only give the old homestead a fresh coat of paint, but I've finally made it properly functional again. There's a search box on the right, which I removed four years ago after it broke and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. It works again. I've updated my links, tweaked the about page (including the addition of my favourite photo of myself), and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you'll find a new copyright notice and the very best renovation, pagination! You can now actually page back through previous entries (and then forward again, if you're so inclined), a feature which was long overdue. The category archives are also paginated, so you won't have to scroll through one single monstrous page when you check those out. I've also included more meta-data on each post (well, I'm now telling you in the post itself where I've categorized it). Also new in the sidebar (under "MORE VESTIGE.ORG") are links to two mini-sites I built a few years ago (one dates back to July of 2000, the other to November 2002). Oddly, each of them brings me more visitors in a month than the blog does in a year.

What I haven't done, is redesign the comment approval or search results pages. Which means that whatever those MovableType plug-ins have as their default look and feel, that's what you'll be getting for now. I may or may not deal with them later; for now it's enough that they work. Everything else (links to individual entries, etc.) should be right where I left it, so if you run into any problems, please either leave me a comment in this entry, or drop me a line. Cheers!

Regular readers (or even readers who have read none of this site except the last post) will know that I'm currently reading Steven Heighton's Flight Paths of the Emperor, and should be done with it in the next day or so. When I am finished with that, I will begin reading Rawi Hage's Cockroach, which arrived in the mail this morning. I was given the book so that I would write a short review to be published elsewhere, and as such I don't want to post a full review here until after the short one has been published in that venue, which will not be until October at the earliest. So: though it will actually be book #55 for the year, my review will have it labeled as #56 or more likely #57. This may not be a particularly important detail to most of you, but it's important to me and my reading project. Consider yourself informed.

The flood damage is nearly all cleaned up now (my parents gave me a dehumidifier as an early birthday present, and it now ranks as probably the second best birthday gift I've ever received) and several of my lost books have been replaced, so posting should resume regularly in the next day or so. The good news, I guess, is that I'm only two books behind, so it shouldn't be too much work to catch up.

I'm not generally "that sort of reader", but I am kind of disappointed that I will now have a crisp, new copy of Ulysses on my bookshelf instead of the well-used and much loved copy I had before. The old copy was as much a kind of trophy as it was a book that I read an enjoyed. Happily I don't fall into the books-as-trophies category too often (the only other two examples I can think of are Don Quixote and The Recognitions). You can go ahead and think less of me after this revelation, or not, as you see fit.

There's a big update pending. In fact, I was going to finish the last few pages of Underworld and post about it tonight. But I'm right in the middle of a massive hard drive failure. Massive. So I'm spending the night making emergency backups and hoping my machine doesn't crap out before I'm done. So no update tonight. And possibly not for a couple of months, depending on how long it takes me to get the scratch together for a new machine. I'll keep you kind folks posted on how things are progressing whenever I get a few minutes in front of a public computer.