The reading slow down has happened, and I am back to reading like normal!
This was bound to happen.
My daughter started preschool on Wednesday. She was excited. Too excited. And in addition to that, we had an ungodly amount of paperwork to do. Why is there so much? And why did they give it all to me at the last minute?
And then there were all the procedures we had to learn. The drop off and pick up lines are so intimidating that there was just no way we were getting them wrong. Lo and behold, I was directed to the wrong spot at pick up and the app (because everything has an app now) never updated that my daughter had been dismissed. So I had to flag down one of the teachers to ask where my daughter was. It worked out. She got to me, and she had the best day ever. But all of these procedures are definitely stressful.
So don’t mind me right now. I’m just learning a whole new state of being and vocabulary, so my daughter can have a successful school year. It’s a whole lot.
But enough about that. Let’s get into what I did manage to read this week.
Reading Social Media News
The amount of traffic ChatGPT is sending to websites has fallen drastically. What is interesting is that it hasn’t fallen for sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia. The way these sites prioritize the answer over anything else is likely the reason behind this. So as you are creating content, you may want to experiment with prioritizing the answer above all else to see if that gives you any kind of bump.
I have a love-hate relationship with hashtags. People overuse them, and they don’t really give you the boost you think they do. So whenever I see a network limit them, I have hope that hashtags will start being used in the way they are effective at this point: to connect your content with communities. So yay for TikTok limiting hashtags!
Reading Books, Books and More Books
Past
Like I said last week, I was excited to read The Antidote by Karen Russell until someone told me it likely wasn’t for me. I’m kind of glad my excitement had been knocked down, because this book had a much easier time with me.
Was it for me? Eh. There were a lot of plot holes, and it dragged from time to time. But I would say that it showed some promise of what Russell could be as a writer. And even though it didn’t have a very satisfactory resolution, I think Russell asks a lot of the right questions. She just needs to figure out the answers to those questions a little bit better. I’ll probably even give her another chance with her next novel. All the parts are there, and with a better editor, I bet her next novel will be great. However, this one is… just not there. Score: C+
Present
I don’t know what is going on with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. Could this be part of the reason why my reading has slowed down? Yes. It’s so far an odd book. I realized after I had it in my hands that it is classified as Horror. I hate Horror as a genre, but this isn’t reading like what I hate. So I’m going to keep going. At some point, I’ll figure out what is going on. Maybe.
What are you reading? What books are you looking forward to?