Realignment
When I began this site, I was intentionally vague about my intentions, in large part because I wasn’t entirely sure of them myself. I knew I wanted to write about books, and I knew I wanted to explore what it meant to hold a personal discussion about books (which are always read in solitude) in the public space of the web. But I did not know – and did not want to know – where that discussion would take me.
So over the summer I took a meandering route, reading and writing more or less as things came to me, without much consideration for how (or if) it would all come together. And it shows. There’s a spontaneity and stream of consciousness to the writing that I find both appealing and frustrating. Appealing in that I’ve been free to toy with ideas and then discard them without justification; frustrating in that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, some of the parts are clearly superior to the whole.
I suppose this is, to some extent, the inevitable consequence of publishing frequently; the quality of the writing is bound to ebb and wane. But I do think it warrants some adjustment. For one, I’m clearly better at writing long than writing short, so I’m going to make an effort to do more of the former and less of the latter. If that means I post less frequently, so be it. Reading long can be difficult on the web (as my last post attests), but I’m not about to concede that it can’t be done.
In fact, I’m so convinced it can be done that I’ve redesigned the site to make it friendlier to readers. Each post will receive it’s own page – a room of its own, so to speak. The sidebar content has been tucked into the footer, which is now hidden away with a bit of javascript (click on the little “more” tab to retrieve it). I’ve also eliminated the related books sidebar, which never really came together as I thought it would. The result is, I hope, a site that invites and encourages reading – hopefully a welcoming oasis in a web otherwise awash with clutter.
An argument could be made that this goes too far – that I’ve sacrificed certain inalienable principles of web design (notably, orientation and ease of navigation) in favor of creating a space for reading. But since this is a personal site I feel free to experiment in ways I may not recommend for a client. And I think reading is an often and unfortunately neglected behavior in the context of web design. Bringing attention to a cause usually involves taking things to an extreme, and I’m happy to be out on a limb on this one.
The previous version of this site (now referred to as the First Edition) is now available at 1e.aworkinglibrary.com and will remain there indefinitely. I intend to archive all design iterations this way, such that one can follow the process through which the design has traveled. While some things have changed here, one fact remains constant: that the writing and design on this site are inescapably intertwined. For that, I offer no apology.
