To say that 2022 was not one of my better years would be to put it mildly, but then can any amongst us really say that any of the past three years have been some of our finest? A wave of personal and professional problems pushed me to the proverbial brink, so close to it in fact that I nearly brought a number of things to an end, including the publication of The Well-read Naturalist. Indeed, before I was able to pull back, I had already destroyed most of the social media that I use to promote this publication; much of which I was not able to resurrect and consequently had to return to the beginning to once again build. In addition to this, my reading and publication schedules were in tatters, and more often than not as I looked over what I had written I found it to be inferior to the work I had done a few years prior – in the Before Times as I’ve now heard it called.

Yet as that German fellow with the bushy mustache was fond of saying, “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker” (That which does not kill me makes me stronger). Now a bit more solidly on my feet once again, I’ve been able to look back over the past year and reflect upon where the straight path was lost, and what I may be able to do in the coming year to keep more reliably to it. Some of these reflections are personal and need not be lingered over here, however others pertain very much to The Well-read Naturalist and what you may expect to find published in it in 2023.

Publishing Schedule

Keeping a regular schedule of publication is key to any well-managed public journal. In pursuit of that, you should expect to see something new for your reading enjoyment and – it is hoped – edification thrice weekly, each Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday to be precise. Publication of new material will occur at one minute past midnight UTC+0 (Coordinated Universal Time, what I still tend to refer to by the more poetic but now archaic Greenwich Mean Time).

Social Media

As I noted above, in 2022 I destroyed much of the social media used to extend the reach of The Well-read Naturalist. The Facebook and Instagram accounts were not able to be resurrected and thus have been begun anew. Only the Twitter account was able to be saved – and that, as you no doubt know, is problematic in and of itself. First and foremost I would like to state very clearly that I find what Mr. Musk has done to Twitter since acquiring it is at very best unethical, and at worst perhaps a matter for national and international authorities to decide. When the now so-named “Twixodus” occurred, I thought it was best to do so was well. The problem is that many long-time readers of The Well-read Naturalist stayed, for reasons as individual as they are, active on the site. This left me troubled, as by closing the Twitter account of this publication I felt that I was abandoning them, yet I felt that by staying on it I was somehow contributing to the debacle that Twitter had rapidly become under Mr. Musk’s control. Thus, out of respect for my readers who, for their own reasons that are none of my business, I have come to the decision that the account will remain and continue to be updated, at least for the immediate future and with an eye on future developments there.

Something positive did emerge from the Twitter implosion however: The Well-read Naturalist now has an account on Mastodon. On this rapidly expanding “fediverse,” I have found a remarkable community of people who seem to feel a genuine sense of digital togetherness, who help one another whenever possible, and who want to prevent it from devolving into the Hellscape that Twitter years ago became.

Therefore, if you engage with the world via social media, you can – and I very much hope will – find The Well-read Naturalist on:

  • Facebook (the original Facebook page of The Well-read Naturalist once numbered nearly 4,000 followers; now, well… let’s see what we can do with this new one, shall we?)
  • Instagram (mostly pictures of books and nature-themed pins)
  • Mastodon (Join the herd!)
  • Twitter (alas…)
  • TikTok (don’t hold your breathe regarding this one – while the account exists, I’m not finding the entire platform particularly conducive to this publication – or my own personality and preferences for that matter)

The Big Read 2023

Each year for decades now, I’ve followed a personal practice of reading the entire works of William Shakespeare. However having now done so for so long I’ve found myself including additional works contemporary to his plays and verse in order to fill the year (2022 saw all the plays plus the poems completed by early September). Therefore this year I’m making a change to this and taking up a new author: Plato. I’ve read perhaps a little over half of his extent writings in the past, some many more times than I can recall, but as the result of a few particularly interesting essays I read in 2022 I would like to delve deeper into those that I have read, explore those still new to me, and expand my general understanding of the entire corpus and the times in which it was composed. My main texts for the works of Plato himself will be:

In addition to these core translated texts (my Greek isn’t quite as proficient as it once was, something I’m also hoping to remedy in the coming year), I shall also be reading complementary works to acquire a better understanding of Plato’s ideas and his times. Presently on the list of such books are:

“But how do the works of Plato pertain to The Well-read Naturalist?” you may be asking. As I practice what the Quakers most superbly refer to as rational recreation, and as I take the “well-read” portion of this publication’s name as every bit as important as the “naturalist” part of it, I see such authors as Plato as foundational to both what will develop into natural philosophy, natural history, and the history of science and medicine itself. I also know that their works were much better known to the natural philosophers, naturalists, scientists, and doctors of centuries past than they are to many people today (see C.P. Snow’s excellent 1959 Rede Lcture later published as The Two Cultures for a better explanation of this state of affairs as it existed in the mid twentieth century, and know that it has appeared to worsen yet further approaching our own present day). In order to understand what those who came before us have to offer, we must make an effort to know more of what they knew, lest we shall fall into the error of erroneous judgement that I see as far too common today. This will be developed further in short essays and notes published to the section The Big Read 2023: Plato here in The Well-read Naturalist.

Podcast

I have long contemplated creating a podcast for The Well-read Naturalist. Will 2023 be the year I do so? Possibly; however there is much I still need to learn in order to become even minimally competent in the techniques of recording, editing, and publishing such a production. I’ve often been told I have an excellent voice for audio presentation, and if that’s true, I’d like to bring it into the furtherance of telling people about interesting books. Perhaps all I can state for certain about whether it will happen this year is “stay tuned.”

So here’s to the coming year! May it be a damn sight better than the one just concluded – and the previous three for that matter – and may we all find ourselves still together with those we love at the end of it looking back and able to say “we did everything we could to make it a more pleasant, more productive, better informed, and wisely conducted one than those before it, and it was.”