Milinda’s Questions

January 1, 2008. Akemashite omedetoh gozaimasu. Out with the old, in with the new. Time to take stock and to plan ahead. Blah, blah, blah.

During 2007 I put up a total of 30 posts on Milinda’s Questions. On average, about once every 12 days. Not a stunning total. The topic breakdown, using my none-too-informative classification scheme, was:

The temporal distribution was:

Looked at that way, the most salient feature was the outburst of activity during the summer, which faded in intensity in late summer and was overcome by silence for the final quarter of the year. What happened? It wasn’t any lack of intellectual activity; were I to list the books read in 2007, the period of blog-inactivity in the fall would correspond with the period of the most intense reading. (I can make no such justifications regarding my lackluster performance during the first half of the year.) Here’s an incomplete list of what I’ve read since the beginning of August:

• Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran
• The Ant and the Peacock : Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today by Helena Cronin
• Why God Won’t Go Away : Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg
• The World of Herodotus by Aubrey de Selincourt
• Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan
• The End of Faith by Sam Harris
• Thoughts without a thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective by Mark Epstein
• Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview by Michael Heidelberger
• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
• Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The All-True Travels And Adventures Of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley
• Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Parva by by S. L. Bhyrappa
• Culture and Society by Raymond Williams
• Public Opinion by Walter Lippman
• Antigone, trans. Paul Woodruff
• Meno, trans. Jane N. Day
• The Oresteia, trans. George Theodoridis
• Why We Love : The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Helen Fisher
• The Role of Serotonin in Psychiatric Disorders

A moderately respectable list, if I do say so myself. In fact, over the past three months I’ve read three books for every post I’ve put up on this blog — and none of the posts had anything at all to do with what I was reading. So here’s a standing offer: if anyone wants to know what I thought about any of those books, post a comment or shoot me an e-mail and I’ll be glad to tell you.

But why didn’t I do that during the fall, when I was doing all that reading? I’ll try to say something about that in a little while (there, that’s my first commitment-that’ll-probably-be-broken of 2008) but first: This suggests a way to Milinda’s Questions at least the appearance of a little more life during its fallow periods. Install one of those what-I’m-reading-now widgets over in the sidebar. Which I think I’ll do, right now. Stay tuned.