(5:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Reading Blogs with Limited Time

I bought a whole lot of books in the last couple days, and I'm not sure when exactly I'm going to read them. I already have so much going on in my life -- maintaining a world-famous, widely-read blog, learning Homeric Greek, hours of personal devotional time (really spending time "in" a particular book -- you know, like when people say, "I've been 'in' Romans lately"? -- that's me), my high-paying job as an accountant/x-ray analyst/computer consultant, and my burgeoning social life. Honestly, when I look at all that, then look at a stack of books that reaches up to my belt, I realize that some tough choices are ahead for me. Life-changing choices. Choices so important that they warrant a Josh Marshall-style sentence fragment.

With that in mind, I'd like to alert the world of my blog-reading schedule. My first stop, of course, is The Weblog, since I like to check for the occasional co-blogger contribution and for more comments. Then I go to a Gauche. Although he's on hiatus, I still check back every day, as one of his commenters confessed. Next on my list is usually Chun the Unavoidable, just because his posts are usually short and moderately humorous. Then I make a quick swing by Adam Robinson and Cap'n Pete, with the occasional glance at Long Pauses. I close out my required reading by a glance at Virtual Stoa, Spurious, and John and Belle. (Occasionally Spurious is higher on the list, depending on my mood [am I depressed? would I like to be?] and whether I feel like I'll have time for the occasional insanely long post.)

What does this reveal about me? First, I don't want to deal with a blog that updates more than one or two times a day. Very rarely do any of those on the "must read" list go above that level. Second, all of the blogs (save Spurious and J&B) above blogroll me. Although I don't know all of the authors personally and don't get comment participation from all of them (or comment much on theirs), I still feel like more part of a community with blogs that have acknowledged my existence and feel more motivated to keep up with them. Thus, though John and Belle haven't blogrolled me, to my knowledge, I like to keep up with them because I've commented a lot there and have gotten some really good, well thought-out responses.

A blog has to be really good, like Spurious usually is, to make it feel like a must-read without also having that personal touch, since most blog material is pretty mediocre, objectively speaking. If I'm looking to just have something to read, I usually go to CalPundit, Crooked Timber, and Matthew Yglesias, in that order, all of which are fairly prolific and informed -- but if I have limited time, I'm not going out of my way for any of them. I've experimented with going first to the "portal" sites like Cursor, Political Science Daily, or Arts and Letters Daily, but usually they're the last stop, when I'm just looking to kill time and still be reading something intelligent.

Now, back to reading about empire.

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