Introduction

I've been planning this blog for some time now, and there's nothing like pulling the trigger and posting that first entry to motivate you to really get it going.  Welcome to the 172,962,784th reading blog on the internet!  And honestly that number might be low.

I've made a renewed commitment to myself to begin reading much more regularly.  It's one of my favorite activities, but over the last few years I've let the business and busyness of life crowd out making time for it like I should.  Well no more!  I created a goal on Goodreads to finish a certain number of books by the end of the year, and the fact that it can be seen by a grand total of one person, a family member who is my sole follower, I'm sure will provide all the accountability I need, right?

But why blog about the books I read?  Largely it's a personal matter for me.  I find that writing about a topic is the best way for me to put my thoughts in order on it.  Tongue no work good, but there seems to be a special conduit between my brain and my fingers that lets me convert thoughts into visible form.

I don't want to just read books for the sake of reading them, but feel like I'm really absorbing them, reflecting on the themes they contain, and understanding what I like and don't like about them - and why.  Even this introduction is really just for me to reflect on my motivations.  So this blog really is personal, and I have no expectations of garnering a following of any kind.  But I'm glad you're here if you're reading this, and I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me.

I'll be embarrassingly honest - the biggest hurdle I've had in getting this blog started has been coming up with a name and blogspot domain name.  I thought up multiple clever names, only to find out that shockingly other people are good at coming up with clever names too, and everything I wanted was taken already.  I finally just had to settle for a parallel with my other blog, 40/30 Gaming, which is appropriate since it will be a sort of companion blog.  Reading and playing video games are my two favorite hobbies, after all.  I've never explained the meaning of the name of my other blog / YouTube channel before, but coupled with 46/41 Reading it probably isn't too hard to decipher now.

So what will I be reading?  It will largely be genre fiction, particularly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror.  From time to time there will be some non-fiction Christian works (I'm determined to eventually get through the complete works of C.S. Lewis) or self improvement books.

I've decided to start off though by going through the history of gothic horror.  I'm a huge classic horror fan - Frankenstein, Dracula, Edgar Allen Poe, and the like.  I'm not really a reader of 20th/21st century horror though.  To me the horror genre peaked with H.P. Lovecraft, who is one of my favorite authors of all time.  Lovecraft wrote an influential essay on the subject called "Supernatural Horror in Literature."  In it he not only discussed the elements of horror, but also gave an overview of the history of the genre and how it developed.  It's inspired me to follow along the same journey, reading the most influential horror books of history in the chronological order they were published.

To that end I'll be starting this blog off with what is generally considered to be the very first horror story ever written, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.  From there we'll follow up with works by the greats - Radcliffe, Lewis, Shelly, Stoker, and the like - until ultimately we arrive at Lovecraft himself.  Now his work was never gothic horror, but rather a creation of his own known as cosmic horror.  Still, despite creating a brand new sub-genre, his work was still built on all that came before it.

So that's it.  Hopefully I'll have the book finished in a few days and will have my first real post up afterwards.  I hope I'll see you there.