Some people  asked me earlier when I started affiliate advertising to share how well or poorly it worked out. The answer is that is resulted in roughly $100 in revenue for January, plus some spare change in December, which is pretty solid, especially considering that my traffic isn’t all that high. I only reviewed four books for the whole month (although I linked to some others also). It’s about 5x what I thought it would be for the first month, so that’s nice. That’s off of over $1,500 in purchases.

I way prefer this to begging for donations, but I expect to have my first book out soon…ish… and this works well with that, so I have no plans to switch to that.

The bulk of it came in from books of various kinds, some home goods, the odd piece of furniture,tools, and a couple Kindles. I am not likely to branch out into those categories, but it’s interesting to see some of the kinds of things that my readers are buying.

If there’s a particular book you want me to review, or are an author, e-mail me your suggestions.

I’ve decided to be less haphazard about how I write and read about the classics.

Here is the classics reading list. It’s long. It’ll probably take me a year or more to fill the gaps that I haven’t read, and also to re-read the pieces that I have read before.

I also want some excuses to write about them, in part because we all probably need some remedial education in them, given that when they are still taught, they’re taught from the perspective that all the people who wrote and cherished these stories are evil people to be loathed.

Rather than deconstructing, I’ll be reconstructing. The first commentary will be on the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Because I don’t know the classical languages and am not sure I will ever have time to do so, I’ll have to rely on translations most of the way through. The only language that I can read well enough besides English is French.

I tend to be bad at preserving most of the writing that I keep private, so this is partly also to help me be a bit more organized about how I keep my e-papers.

I’ll be mostly focusing on any one time period in the list at once, but I’m likely going to jump around when I feel like it.

If you write or have written commentary on one or many of the titles on the list, contact me, I’ll review it, and if it’s good, I’ll link out to your article.