This book is a bizarre case study of how the over-complicated reading cycle here at TOA prevents books from falling through the cracks (or perhaps, an over-complicated case study of the bizarre reading cycle).
The usual process looks like this:
(i) read the book
(ii) log the book in both my Google drive and an email draft
(iii) write out notes from the book
(iv) transfer the notes to both my Google drive and my personal laptop
(v) write on my laptop whatever eventually ends up on TOA
(vi) delete the book entry from my email draft
And then a few weeks later...
(vii) compare my library checkout history against the book log in my Google drive to make sure I didn’t miss anything
I'm describing all of this because last week I posted a reading review for Teaching a Stone to Talk a full year after I finished reading. Although it was a little embarrassing to admit I'd missed a book, I was also curious about how my system caught the miss and enabled me to belatedly post a reading review.
In this specific case, I originally forgot the second half of step (iv) and never transferred my notes to my laptop. I therefore was headed down the path of not writing a TOA entry for this book because I had nothing on my laptop to reference for the reading review. However, I eventually noticed that the email draft list I update in step (ii) had a lingering book from way back in 2018. This prompted me to check the blog archive and, discovering no posts about the book, I recognized my oversight.
There is a good lesson here in the value of layering multiple interlocking steps into a complex process as a means of ‘natural’ yet simple QA. This method allows me to move quickly with the admin of the process without allowing a small error in one step to spell doom for the rest of the process. In the specific context of my reading review process, I suspect would need to miss at least three full steps in the above – (ii), (iv), and (vii) – in order to completely neglect writing a TOA post about a finished book.
That combination seems highly unlikely (famous last words, of course, for a failed system). If I ever became paranoid about the possibility, I suppose I could add another routine check such as an annual comparison of my reading log against my completed posts. If I went this far, the possibility of failing to write about a given book would essentially disappear, but I'm not quite ready for that step yet.
