Stanza Break: Some thoughts on lineage

Thank you again for your patience as I transitioned Stanza Break to this new platform. It's been on my mind for some time, but I was concerned about how disruptive the process would be. So far, I'm very impressed with Buttondown. On my end, the transition was fairly painless and Justin, the human behind Buttondown, has been incredibly supportive. I'm still learning what this platform can do and how to do it, so I'll continue to make adjustments, but that was true before the switch as well. All Stanza Break archives, including the paid posts, have migrated. Some formatting issues have popped up on those posts, so over the coming weeks I'll be cleaning everything up and, once that's done, shutting down my Substack account. If you run into any issues as readers, please let me know!

Now, here's the regular update:

At the beginning of January I joined a new reading tracking app called StoryGraph, an alternative to the Amazon-owned Goodreads (you knew Amazon owned Goodreads, right?). I've never used an app like this (I have my own reading tracking methods, both analog and digital), so I can't really compare StoryGraph to any others, but I'm enjoying it. I started tracking my reading in 2013, by hand in a notebook, a practice I continue still because it allows me to slow down and assess a little. I write a page of first impressions which helps me wrap my mind around what a book is doing. Every review I've written since 2013 has started from those first impressions, including every Stanza Break piece. In order to get familiar with what StoryGraph can do, I uploaded all of my reading from 2013 to now.