Breaking Habits

I've finished taking the bibliographic notes on my second book. I really haven't finished my writeup of either book, but honestly I wanted to get some example material up so I can take a crack at putting together some notes.

I've realized that what I really need to be aware of is that I'm a bit of an archivist by nature, and honestly this exercise isn't about that at all. I caught myself trying to build out all sorts of extraneous structure around the works cited from books. And while I want to capture some of that information so that if I run across something that is in multiple books or such I can catch it, I don't need to setup my system with the assumption I'm going to read every source that every book I read references.

While it may sound like not a horrible idea to fill out my knowledge, my purpose at this stage isn't to be an expert on everything- it's more about to figure out where I want to become an expert - what topics are interesting. I think it's a much better idea to get a high level awareness of a bunch of different disciplines and look for patterns or interesting ideas.

I have a third book I'm going to take some notes- I committed to a small scale book club and I would like to get my brain back around that book. I don't expect nearly as many notes as the book I just finished- it's a different writing style. What I find a little frustrating in the book I'm working on is that I feel like there are sources that are being used, but they aren't mentioned in the text- so I may have a bit of leg work after the fact to link some things together. I'm not sure at this stage if it's worth doing.

I'm still annoyed at the parts of the site that still don't work. I'm not sure anyone is looking at this thing, but I'm sorry. I hopefully will get the categories and other features of the site working at some point. I spend a lot of time working on technical aspects of sites, and I would rather work on the content of this site than dig into the plumbing. I'm just exicted that it works as well as it does with as little effort as I've put in.