Alright, first post!

It’s been awhile since I’ve started up a blog with book blogging in mind. Eight years, in fact – that was when I started my own ‘booklr’, as such blogs were (are?) called on Tumblr in 2012 (the same year I started my Goodreads account, in fact). I’d already been on Tumblr for a year by that point, with my small fandom blog that had more than its fair share of Doctor Who gifs, Marvel theories, and cringe-y jokes, but increasingly found that I wanted to start one that specifically focused on books and reading. I was still a year or two out from deciding to become an English major, but I’d made a goal to read 100 books in 2013, posting reviews for each book I read, and connecting with other readers working on reading challenges of their own. I may not have read 100 books that year, but I did end up running that blog for seven years, until 2019, though by that time the focus of the blog had changed quite a bit. It had slowly but steadily morphed from a ‘booklr’ into a ‘studyblr’ – which, you can likely guess, is a tumblr blog centered around studying and everything else academia – and, after my graduation from college, eventually just devolved into a place for me to share aesthetic photos and quotes. But back in 2012, when I clicked ‘publish’ on my first post on that blog, I’d decided to focus on book-blogging because I’d been looking to get back into reading after a three-year reading slump.

The past two years, for me, were also marked by a pretty severe reading drought. For reference, I only read a total of fifteen books last year – a new personal low record, which I’d thought I’d set the year before, when I’d read only 33 – and there were eight months where I didn’t pick up a book at all. Before those two years, from 2013 to 2018, at least, I had been consistently reading at least 45 books a year.

So far, 2021 has been a slow but steady return to more regular reading, the slump finally receding. I finished my fifteenth book of the year yesterday (Sarah Pearce’s Sanatorium) and my new job working as a library assistant has definitely helped me revive my excitement for reading. My shifts are filled with compiling lists of books, shelving returns, pulling holds, and reading bookish articles, so it’d be impossible for me not to find at least one new title to add to my TBR a day. I tend to leave each shift with a new book checked out on my card, and every other shift or so, I’ll bring books to return.

I doubt this blog will be much like that first, where I would post short reviews for every single book I read and re-blogged any book-related gif I laid eyes on. Nowadays, I’m more content compiling book lists, writing up bookish year-in-reviews, and the occasional essay-style post, so that will likely be the sort of content I publish. I’m not expecting much by way of followers and readers here (that’s more of a Tumblr thing in my view anyway), and that’s quite alright by me – I’m more than happy to just have all my writings about my reading all in one place for myself, and that just so happens to be this blog.

So we’ll see, how many more books I manage to read by the end of the year. I already know that, with two and a half months left of the year, I’ll pass last year’s total of fifteen. My goal for this year was twenty-five. Only ten left to go before I reach my goal – we’ll just have to see what those ten will be!