Coming Soon...

My plans for this place in 2025

Good morning. I came up with a plan for this place that I hope will interest you, and many other people. So far, I’ve largely used this Substack to post, or rather re-post old pieces I wrote for my blog The Kind of Face You Hate. But I don’t want to do that anymore, it doesn’t seem like a viable means of keeping A Rip in the Picture afloat. So here’s the idea.

As you may have gathered, I am a reader. A consequence of this is that I own many, many, many books. Over the years, I have come up with different reading projects for myself — for an indeterminate amount of time, I would only read novels about World War II, for example — that I’ve never been able to stick with, and after a few weeks I end up reading whatever I feel like, whether it fits the project or not. Despite an inability to stick with this sort of thing, I did once come up with what I consider a terrific reading project idea, which, this coming January, I will take up again. This time, I won’t waver.

What I’m going to do is, I’m going to go to each individual bookshelf in my home — not bookcase, mind you, the shelves in the bookcases — and I will read one book by an author I’ve read before, and one by a writer I’ve never read. What this will achieve, I believe, is that it will ensure a greater variety in my reading. More importantly (sort of), after I’ve finished each pair of books, I will write them up for A Rip in the Picture. Two book reviews per post. How often these posts will go up, I don’t know. Every week would be nice, but I can’t guarantee that. So they’ll go up as often as I can manage it.

The other thing you should know is that I plan on making this a pay site. Well, to a degree. My plan right now is to limit every other post to paid subscribers. Which means, of course, that half of these posts will still be free. So you can still read this site for free, just not all of it. I also currently intend to keep the amount being paid, by those who wish to read it all, up to the subscriber. Based on my experience with Substack, $5 a month seems to be the minimum. Anyway, that’s what my small handful of monthly paid subscribers are shelling out (which I appreciate more than you can know).

So that’s pretty much it. There are other specifics and peculiarities I’ll need to work out. For instance, the vast majority of my library is shelved in alphabetical order, by author’s last name, but I also have bookcases with no order to them, beyond the fact that they are populated by my favorite writers, the ones who mean the most to me. Also I have my NYRB Classics books, and my Valancourt Books, on their own shelves. How I’ll work those books into this plan, I’m not sure, but I bet I’ll figure it out. You guys don’t need to know the details. I may break things up again by writing separate, sort of “intermission” posts about books and writers not covered by the project.

Anyway, that’s the idea! Again, I’m starting in January. I have two writers, from the first shelf, picked out, but I’m not going to tell you who they are. That first post will be free, though. The second one will be the first behind a paywall.

I think this will be good and I think you will all like this. Tell your friends about it. Your friends will be forever grateful.

Also I imagine I will still write about movies. How this will be fit into the rest of it, well, your guess is as good as mine.