A Short Post About Eric's Daily Longreads

After more than two years and 453 posted longreads, I'm taking a break from the daily updating of this blog. I'm doing this for several reasons:

1. The thrill is gone: I don't get the same excitement about reading, reviewing, and posting longreads as I did in the past. Over the last few months, daily updates began to feel more and more like a chore. The impact of this was noticeable in the omission of article introductions and in the fact that there were many more slips (days without new articles posted).

2. Lack of material: Over time, I had amassed a large collection of longreads that were queued up to post. I've churned through those, and there are no more in waiting. As I've read more and more longform articles over the past few years, I've tried to raise my standards in deciding what is worth posting (or in other words, what I think is worth your time). I don't want to lower my standards just to keep this blog updated daily.

3. New focus: With so much time spent reading longreads, I have for years seriously neglected reading books. Fiction, especially, was cast by the wayside. I decided at the beginning of this year that I wanted to create more balance in my reading, and so far, I'm thoroughly enjoying reading books again. In many ways, I feel the same excitement about reading books now that I felt about reading longreads when I started this blog. Unfortunately, this exacerbates the "lack of material" problem as I am just not reading enough longreads to sustain content for the blog.

I still intend to update this blog from time to time with articles that I think are worth reading. So much quality journalism is found in longreads, and I hope to stay engaged with that literature base. But I can no longer live up to the name of having a "daily longread." Nevertheless, I encourage you to please check in on the blog from time to time (or subscribe by RSS) if you'd like to get those updates.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me in starting this blog through words of encouragement, subscribing by email or RSS, reading articles, sharing links, commenting on posts, and/or just finding a way to discuss these articles with me. It means a lot to me that a number of you have stuck with this blog over the past two years.

Signing off -- for now,

Eric