The Litertarian Redux

My friends, I come to you today with something new.

Historically, this site has been exclusively book reviews. I launched it almost exactly two years ago after reading a book so good I had to write about it (it was The Rom Commers, for curious minds). I’ve kept book blogs in the past; some of them in a reading journal style, others more structured, like this one. At this point, book reviews are a foundational piece of my reading process.
But reading and recommending books is only one face of the multi-faceted life of a Litertarian, and it has been pressed into my heart recently that I want this site to serve as a reflection of my actual literary life, and that means much more than 400 word one-and-done book reviews.

Quite a bit more, actually.

I sat down to think about how I want to translate these things into this site, and I’m so pleased with what I came up with.
In addition to book reviews, which will still serve as the ‘Archive’ backbone of my site, these are the additional pillars of content you can expect going forward:

Curated Reading Lists

To start, I will be compiling the many years and hundreds of titles of reading I’ve done in my life into useful recommendation lists. I’m hoping to add a little more flavor than a typical listicle, and to stay honest with my recommendations (as opposed to just churning out content for the sake of it). Of course I’ll take requests, too, if there’s a certain type of mood you’re looking for.
Let me know which of my preliminary ideas excite you most:

1. Classics you shouldn’t be afraid of (and some I still am)
2. My auto-buy authors + my top recommendations for each
3. Books I’ll probably never read + a note on delayed gratification
4. Novels I’m still chasing the feeling of…

The Storycraft Dispatch

If you didn’t know, in addition to being a voracious reader, I am also a writer. Of fiction, and more recently, of essays (more on that later). As such, I am an everlasting student of story. Imagine me as a sieve, hovering below the pages of every story I read, hopeful to capture new bits of technique or style or theme or even philosophy that might occur to me as I read.

We are amalgamations of everything we consume, including story (of all forms), and I want to start distilling some of that into articles to help me hone my own ideas, sharing for others to follow along on my path to become a better, more thoughtful writer.

These will not be ‘how-to’s or coming from any place of authority. Hence the title. I am in the metaphorical trenches with all the rest of you, on the search for how I can add more honesty, truth, beauty, and meaning into the work that I do, reporting back what I find.

Which leads me to…

The Life and Times of a Meaning-Starved Millennial

One aspect of being a quintessential “Renaissance Man” is thinking deeply and organizing those thoughts into pieces of writing. Considering it is a priority of mine to become a Renaissance man (more details in the next section), I will be writing more personal essays.

While these won’t necessarily have anything to do with books, the practice itself is inspired by some of the greatest writers in recorded history, and I have a feeling the people who appreciate my other content pillars will have at least a passing interest in the topics I choose to write about.

In today’s world, where we are in a daily struggle against forces trying to control our attention more than ever before, we must fight back. To me, the answer is in exploring the concept of meaning itself, and where we can find it. On some level, it feels like the purpose of our time, unique to any other period of our known history.

These will be self-contained, heavily intuitive, all-encompassing, and mostly free-written. You can sign up for my email list in the sidebar if you’re at all interested in what I’ve described here. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

The Renaissance Initiative

This category is at once my favorite and the most terrifying piece of this new format for me. The Renaissance Initiative is a self-governed challenge for myself to become more of A Renaissance Woman. Don’t worry, I’ll explore in depth what I take that to mean in a future post, but essentially it is a call to become a more rounded human, to find a balance that synergizes all the most important categories of my life, to turn myself into the kind of human I aspire to be.

It’s a self-development challenge. A challenge in self-discipline. Certainly a challenge that I will fail at relentlessly as I stumble in the general direction of my goals. And why not catalogue and share these ambitions and failures on the very public internet? *starts sweating already*

My hope is to inspire, to motivate, and to transform myself, and if others may benefit from sharing my authentic struggles, even better.

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The Book That Changed Everything (It’s not what you think)

Something in me fundamentally changed this year. It was, as all breakthroughs are, a conglomeration of many things at once, but one of them was my experience in reading Homer’s The Iliad for the first time.

It has taken me months to get through. I have scoured its pages and taken over 25,000 words of notes exploring the things it’s evoked within me. As I sit here typing this, I’m still not done. There are four books left of this masterpiece for me yet to discover, and I’m not in a rush. I think that’s because I have this deep-seated fear that no piece of literature could ever move me to the same subatomic level this one has.

On one level, I know that’s the truth. I’ll never have this experience with another book for the rest of my life. And honestly, that’s a devastating feeling. But on another level, I know better than most that every story we encounter has the potential to open something up in us we didn’t know was there. To show us something new.

That is the kind of reading I am interested in now. Not changing my habits entirely, but always having a book, like this, where I throw myself into it, properly study it…imbibe it thoroughly into my DNA.

Reading The Iliad has been utterly transformative, and I couldn’t recommend the experience more highly. Expect to find many, many more posts about it in the future, as I work through the million, billion ways it has rewritten my brain chemistry. Without the experience that book has given me, I am not here, planning to transform my little hobby website into something greater, more honest, more beautifully human.

Your part

If you’ve made it this far, you are almost certainly my people.

So here’s the deal. There will be two ways to follow along. Although I think of myself as a rebel, and as a millennial, I’m nostalgic for the before-times of the algorithm machine, I can also admit that it would be foolish to not take advantage of easy wins they can offer.

That being said, I have also started a page on Substack for The Litertarian. The home base for my content will always be this site, but I will be posting the following pillars on substack to take advantage of their discoverability advantages: The Storycraft Dispatch, The Life and Times of a Meaning-Starved Millennial, and The Renaissance Initiative.

If you are interested in monthly (or maybe twice-monthly, depending on volume) digest-style emails, you’ll want to sign up here for my newsletter. If, however, you’re someone who likes to read full posts in your email agent, you’ll be better served by subscribing via Substack, where you will be notified of every post in your inbox, and will be able to read them there in full. Just be aware that you’ll be missing out on the book reviews and my curated reading list posts. Hey, some of you may even be interested in subscribing to both! In any case, I thank you for your support. Bookmarking, commenting, and good old-fashioned sharing will also help get more eyeballs on my work, and is all appreciated more than you know.

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For single post notifications and the full in-window reading experience, subscribe HERE.

With that, I will bid you adieu for now, and I hope to see you again soon.
(I swear I don’t speak French, it’s apparently just the vibes today)

—E.