I cut my teeth as a writer by doing book reviews, mostly of nonfiction works. It was both enjoyable and, in hindsight, a good idea. My book-reviewing days are now over, for multiple reasons. I’ve moved on, first to writing books and then to essays. I value cultural criticism in all its forms but didn’t particularly enjoy criticizing bad writing or bad books; and my aversion was compounded by a particularly bad, and unfair, review of one of my own books. Writers are like that. 

Readers of this blog are a hearty breed. You already have one of the main prerequisites for being a critical thinker: a tolerance for deeper thinking. Others would say that my head is in the clouds (where I must say I have excellent company, philosophical and otherwise). But these critics always remind me of the doltish New York Times reporter who sneered at President Bill Clinton for “airy theorizing” when Clinton talked about the decline of the nation-state. 

As a self-styled independent scholar, I do a fair amount of reading (despite being a slow, plodding reader). It’s mostly a gleaning process, and the result is a  vague balance of what one consciously learns or remembers and what somehow gets absorbed unconsciously into one’s frameworks and factual understandings. It’s the rare book or essay that is memorable as a reading experience.