#349. Hub City TLC

#349.

I've giving Hub City some TLC, catching up with the work I've done across my other blogs, gathering archives for the three main facets of my book blog: "Scouring Books," where I write about the contents of my personal library; "Reading List," which is an extension of what I started doing here a few years back and was the main reason I started this particular spin-off in the first place, detailing the books I'm currently reading; and "Thoughts On," which is itself a spin-off of the Reading List, where I started writing, well, my thoughts on the books I just finished reading.

So not only did I do that, but I just posted new "Thoughts On" and "Reading List" entries (go have a look a look at Hub City!).  I felt like having a blog like that would be a good example, should anyone stumble onto it, for my belief that there's a lot more interesting stuff to read than I typically experience people exhibiting.  Most of the time, readers tend to stick to one particular genre, or steer toward safe picks like bestsellers, and otherwise avoid trying to find what I find to be a vast assortment of fascinating material, because school left them so scarred about reading that for most people, it's enough to repeat the platitude that reading is important (and that attitude that reading is intellectually better than watching), but mostly avoid actually doing it.

Everyday I kind of kid myself into believing that any day now hundreds if not thousands of readers will spontaneously discover my blogs, any one of them, and it won't seem to ridiculously indulgent and nonsensical to be so much of it.  Hub City is the blog I've had the hardest time finding even tens of people to stumble upon, but I'm still proud of the work I've done and will continue to do for it.  Oftentimes people associate "work" with what you're paid or otherwise have to do, when work can and should be what you want to do.  Those same people give lip service to the idea of the American Dream that suggests anyone can achieve that with enough, ahem, hard work, but the fact is, those same people are busy securing their own success at the direct expense of anyone else trying to do the same.  That's not capitalism, that's not reactionalism, that's the American Reality.  I'm currently working a job Stanley Milgrim would have recognized (and that's all I'm going to say about that), and that's the American Reality, that it's incredibly convenient for the expectation for most Americans to be that they either obey or find themselves jobless, and woe be their own shortcomings.

Anyway, enough ranting...