TGIF: A Book Blogger is Born

graphic courtesy of GReads

TGIF at GReads is a feature for recapping the week’s posts (which I’m skipping this time because you can see them if you scroll down and I trust that you’re smart enough to handle that on your own) and answering a book-blogging question posed by Ginger.

This week the question is: A Book Blogger is Born: What made you decide to start your very own book blog?

This story is pretty simple.  I’d discovered a nostalgia-snark book blog, Are You There Youth? It’s Me, Nikki (which is sadly now pretty quiet), years ago, I believe through one of those Children of the 90s sites.  At some point in December or January, I actually clicked through from Google Reader to Nikki’s site and began checking out some of the blogs on her blogroll.  That is where I discovered book blogs and I was hooked.  I read the backlog of posts (in one case, THREE YEARS WORTH of posts) on a couple of blogs and at some point I decided I wanted to try it out.

You see, I’ve always been a reader.  I’d tried blogging in a couple other genres (humor/personal and crafts) with very little success or even perseverance (I don’t think I passed a couple of weeks or a handful of posts on either of those blogs) , but book blogging made sense.  I was already reading, why not talk about it?  The added bonuses would be actually keeping track of what I read, which I hoped would improve how and what I read.  Also, I hoped to connect with other readers (as I have never really had reader friends in real life) and perhaps make some new friends.  I also wanted to read more critically and while writing has never been my calling, I like doing it and I missed doing purposeful writing like I did in grad school.  So I decided to give book blogging an honest, concerted effort and to see where it would take me.

So far, I am pretty happy with my blog.  I have some loyal readers and I get many meaningful comments.  It still shocks me sometimes that people actually read what I post and it makes me so happy that I get to share books with others.  I am also reading a lot more widely and reading a lot more.  I spend a lot more time thinking about what I read and am hopefully a more critical thinker/reader/writer as a result.  The last few months have been a lot of fun and I look forward to continuing this blog as long as it continues to be fun!

What about you?  What got you started in blogging?