My Blog Is 6!

Today is my blog’s sixth birthday!  What I want to do in this post is to share with you my goals for this coming year of blogging, including my struggles over what some of my goals will be.

My plan is to continue My Year (or More) of Nixon until February 2014. I probably will not read all of the books that I planned to read.  I said on this blog, for example, that I was thinking of reading Theodore White’s books on the 1960, 1968, and 1972 Presidential elections, but that probably won’t happen.  I’m currently drawn more to some of the books about Nixon that are in my local library than I am to some of the books that are in my own personal library.  But I may get back to the latter after March 2014,  Essentially, I’ll be taking a break from My Year (or More) of Nixon in February-March 2014.  Then, I will decide whether to resume my reading of books about Nixon, or to move on to something else.

In February 2014, I will blog through two books for Black History Month.  One is John McWhorter’s Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.  The other is Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.  McWhorter’s book was recommended to me by a conservative who was essentially saying that racism was not a problem that was holding African-Americans back anymore, since there were many African-Americans who were doing quite well, and many who were not had themselves to blame. (I question whether McWhorter himself would go that far, however.)  Hacker’s book was recommended to me by an African-American who wanted to show me that racism indeed remained a problem in American society.

March 2014 will be Women’s History Month.  For that, I am planning to blog through two books.  The first is Christopher Byron’s Martha, Inc. which is a biography of Martha Stewart.  I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I saw it in a bookstore over a decade ago.  I didn’t buy it at the time, but I saw it at a Goodwill years later and bought it then.  I got chills as I read the following line from the cover’s jacket: “Byron attends, through fly-on-the-wall sources, executive meetings with some of the most powerful individuals in American business to watch as they try to deal with a woman who emerged from nowhere to overpower them all.”  I would probably not buy stocks from Martha Stewart, but I respect her because she is a confident, powerful woman, who (according to Byron) apparently rose from obscurity.

The other book that I will read in March 2014 is Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge, which is a biography of Hillary Clinton.  When I was a conservative, I disliked Hillary Clinton immensely (not that I knew her).  Now, I tend to admire her strength and her mind.  Bernstein’s book dates to 2007, so it won’t have anything about her 2008 run for the Presidency, or her time as Secretary of State.  But it may have interesting material about her life up to 2007, which would include her childhood and early life, and her time as First Lady and then United States Senator.

April 2014 will be National Autism Month.  I may blog through a book about Asperger’s for that, or I may not.

A lot of my posts this coming year of blogging will be about political history, or contemporary issues.  Will I still write about the Bible and religion?  Probably so.  I will continue my blog posts about the Book of Psalms until I am done with the Book.  As far as what I will do after that for my weekly quiet time posts is concerned, I’m thinking about that.  Maybe I’ll go on to Proverbs.  Maybe I’ll go on to I-II Chronicles, since I already have an Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture book that includes Chronicles.  Or I may do nothing, since there’s no guarantee that I will have the time.  Come to think of it, most of my plans for this blog that I am discussing are rather tentative.  But they’re what I hope to do.

I’ll still be blogging about my weekly church services.  On whether I will blog about my church’s Bible study, I am debating if I will even attend that.  I have problems with conservative evangelical Christianity, and so I wonder if I should go to my church’s Bible study, where people seem to (on some level) have that particular perspective.  Going to church with my aversion to conservative evangelical Christianity is one thing, but going to a Bible study group is another, since Bible study groups are smaller and more intimate.  I have been reading some of my past posts about my church’s Bible study, and I think that they’re good posts.  Sometimes, the best posts are the ones that we write when we are struggling with something!  But I’m questioning whether I even want to blog about my religious struggles to the extent that I have in the past.  I’ve blogged about a lot of them before, and I’m not sure that I have anything new to add.  Plus, maybe I just don’t want to think about my religious struggles, and would just prefer to enjoy my life.

I’d like to close this post by thanking those who read me.  I have readers who may not read every single post that I write, but they have been reading me for years, and I appreciate that.  I also welcome people who have started reading me.  This past year has been rather slow in terms of my blogs getting new followers, or my posts getting “likes.”  I’ve had previous years that were much more fruitful, at least in that area.  But I appreciate those who read me—-those who come to my blog looking for information, those who click “like,” those who comment, and those who don’t.  I disagree with a blogger who said that blogs that don’t include a space for comments are not true examples of blogging, for my own definition of blogging is simply having a blog and writing on it on a fairly regular basis, whether or not one is popular or interacts with a lot of readers.  But it’s nice to have readers.

On to year 7!