Today’s TTT is books we’re looking forward to being released, but the books I was anticipating have already been released (GIRLS, etc) and the next book on my radar (Rod Dreher’s Warning to Weimar America or whatever final title it takes) has a hazy ‘probably in 2027’ date. Rod posted recently that he just found another book he’s going to be incorporating into the final draft, so who knows. Anyway, I thought today might be a fun day to treat as a freebie and look at never-published drafts. It’s more of a meditation on drafts in general.

Teaser Tuesday

Some thought the straightlaced [Robert] Kennedy, a man who threw Fanny Hill overboard during a Potomac cruise and barred Playboy from his house, was put off by King’s sexual indiscretions, minutely chronicled by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. (Other Kennedy intimates found that laughable, given the womanizing of his father and brother.) Paradoxically, King’s saintliness was also hard to take. “Doc was a moralist,” a Kennedy backer, referring to King, once told the pioneering black journalist Simeon Booker. “A politician just can’t honeymoon with this kind of guy. Sooner or later, there has to be a falling out.” Stylistically, [Robert] Kennedy seemed to prefer the company of grittier black leaders, like the ones who’d organized the rally for him in Indianapolis. Kennedy might have been bitter over King’s sex-laced wisecracks about his late brother and his wife, overheard and recorded and then gleefully transmitted to him by Hoover’s FBI. But guilt too, may have been a barrier. Just how do you befriend someone you’ve wiretapped, especially if, as former attorney general Ramsey Clark has speculated, Kennedy was ashamed of what he had done? THE PROMISE AND THE DREAM: THE UNTOLD STORY OF MLK AND RFK

Top Ten Unpublished Drafts

I frequently work on posts well in advance: for instance, I already have a draft for next year announcing twenty years of book blogging, since this blog’s first post was in May 2007. Sometimes I start a book review post before I’ve even read the book, because I want to get tags and such in order while I’m thinking about it. Witness:

I have finished none of these books with the exception of that Stephen Fry as Lady Bracknell piece: it wound up being short-rounded, I think. (Fry played a part in an audiobook version of “The Important of Being Earnest”, the stage play I have seen performed the most times.) “Some music from the White Zulu” is a Johnny Clegg music post I have prepped for whenever I finish Scatterling of Africa, “Wake Me Up Before You Go, Jo” is the start to a review of Jo Jorgensen’s biography — she was the Libertarian candidate for president in 2020 and is thinking about running again, and Confidence Man is a book I haven’t even bought yet, let alone read. (Nor will I, for a while: I won’t be reading any biographies of living presidents until I finish my dead presidents, and Confidence Man is a Trump biography.)

As you can see, my drafts tend to be more whimsically titled than the final versions. (That’s a Gilda Radner biography I’d checked out, gotten distracted by, and have not yet returned to.)

Sometimes my drafts have nothing to do with books: they’re just something I’m thinking about. Sometimes the thinking is fairly raw and bristling, especially when I’ve been thinking and feeling about a subject.

I will often sit on a review for years because I am not happy with it. To me, the book was great: it needs a great review. If the disparity between the book and what I’ve written is broad enough, I simply don’t post a review. This is why I have never gotten to reviewing Death and Life of Great American Cities: for me, it would be not in the neighborhood but at least the exurban fringes of, reviewing the Bible.

God Bless You Past Me, You Were So Naive and Unsuspecting

Two dormant reviews:

Of course, the Winnah for “Books I read a Long Time Ago and Haven’t Reviewed” is Age of Absurdity. I’ve read it three times since 2013.

Ridiculously Ambitious Series Posts

Yes, there is a version of me who wants to do an entire month of just medieval history and historical fiction. I’m mad, mad! (But one of these days I’m going to do it, so help me.)

Reading Lolita for Jeremy Irons

I started listening to this audiobook for Jeremy Irons, but didn’t finish. It did not stop me from beginning a Margin Call-inspired post, however.

Books I Read and Chose Not to Review

Last year I read Tulsi Gabbard’s For the Love of Country, which I’d bought thinking was a campaign biography of sorts: I’ve been watching her since she was an anti-war Democrat, so I was interested. The book proved to have one remark which was interesting as hell (John Lewis mentioned to Gabbard that the ‘racists’ attacking white students doing sit-ins were often white members of SNCC), but I wound up not posting the book because it was too partisan: while I have posted polemics, they’re good libertarian polemics with a barrel for both parties.

STUFF I LITERALLY FORGOT TO POST

Considering how long I labored on my Provoked review, not posting quotes from it is hilarious.

Interesting Stuff that Doesn’t Quite Belong

Sometimes I create a draft and think, “mm….does this really belong on a book review blog?” I mean, sure, I do create off-topic posts sometimes, but by and large this is a blog about books. And, once a month, movies.

Stuff I Just Didn’t Finish

It happens.

Funny story: that book has two unfinished posts about the same theme. This from 2017;

Past-me obviously meant “VE Day @ 80”.

Another “Post I Didn’t Finish”, and on this one I’m giving a shoutout to the lady-friend who recently publically chided me for not finishing the stack of girl books she gave me back when she was just “a friend of the blog”.

Stuff I Didn’t Post for Whatever Reason

Back in October 2024, I went to a screening of the first episode of “Live Not by Lies”, based on a book I’ve not yet reviewed (damn you, past me, you are such a bum). The post detailed my arriving an hour early along with everyone else because of some miscommunication, but the absolute delight I found in just hanging out with an hour with people who READ BOOKS. (Actually, past me deserves an apology, present-me: he wrote a five-paragraph review of Live Not By Lies but it’s in “I’m Not Happy With It Just Yet” territory. Also, past-me wrote it during COVID, so he was really angry.)

This is probably my favorite part of the post:

Fr. Longenecker and Joseph Peace have both written on how we gollumize ourselves — that is, allow sin or vice or whatever to turn us into pathetic yet proud half-versions of ourselves — but I never posted this for whatever reason.

Well, so ends my thinking about drafts. I hope it doesn’t go too much into “man behind the curtain” territory; my posts begin with brutal honesty and then get made respectable by my editing voice. They’re made to comb their hair, to wear shoes, to straighten their collar. Parts of me are told, “Hey, maybe you just should….chill out back here while the more photogenic thoughts take the runway.” There is more of a look into what’s happening when that happens.

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF JUNE! I have one book review I might post (it’s a short biography of Woodrow Wilson, don’t get excited) and I may finish a movie tonight in which Tom Selleck plays Dwight Eisenhower. Yes, really. It’s a fairly quiet movie, though, and I opened the month with Saving Private Ryan and Pressure so the main thing keeping me going is “Tom Selleck playing Eisenhower is weird“.