Sunday 15 August 2021

Of Living and Dying, and the Stories we Read Inbetween


If there’s one thing that people know about me, it’s that books (and the stories therein) are my first true love. From the earliest story times on the orange-carpeted steps at the library to perusing crowded tables of secondhand books under a bridge in London, there seems no place in my life which hasn’t been touched by my love of reading. 


It should come as no surprise, then, that I’ve always felt the need to engage in the myriad stories that surround me in a deeper sense. 


After I finished my undergraduate degree, which was expectedly rife with the enforced reading that an English/History Major entails, I figured that to keep my writing habit going (and to curb the endless stream of intake slightly) I wouldn’t just keep a book journal listing everything I had read; I would write, as well. Not nearly so formally as I had to for the completion of my degree, but in a way that still provoked a deeper thought process. Enter the world of social media, combine that with a book journaling project for my Master’s degree, and the results are history: shared book reviews for the world to see - or at least a handful of friends and colleagues who enjoy stories equally as much, and who don’t mind my occasionally fangirl-toned reviews of books I absolutely adore. As I opined years ago: booknerds, why aren’t you all on Goodreads and LibraryThing?! That’s where the good bookish times are at!


We dabbled briefly in Bookstagram (Instagram’s not-so-secretly nerdy sub-community): a project that lasted about a year before I got tired of being confined to posting strictly bookish content. Are we really surprised by that change, either? Instagram is great, but its lack of dedication to books meant that my ever-changing interests couldn’t hold fast to the single-focus of a book page nor could my ever-changing aesthetic. (Similar reasoning also halted the creation of a proper Tucker dogstagram account, in addition to his complete lack of regular cooperation for photos… but that’s another story). Sure, I’ll still jump into #bookstagram style posts occasionally (today being a case and point), but mostly we keep the reviews confined to Goodreads and LibraryThing, with teasers to head thattaways in my stories. 


So that’s where we’re at today: still reading (voraciously), still reviewing (semi-critically), and still obsessing over certain books that take our breath away (give me a whimsically cranky protagonist and an exceptional setting, and I’m there). If you’re curious what the latest one is, head on over to Goodreads or LibraryThing. I’ll see you in the stacks!

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