Remembering The Past Decade

A few posts ago, I looked back over the year and remembered the fun things I did regarding reading, blogging and books.

So I thought it would be fun, since we are crossing to a new decade, to now look back over the past TEN years of my reading and bookish life.

1998: (jumping out of the decade just a bit to get started here!) I joined an AOL book club! What a huge step this was for me! Chatting and corresponding with complete Internet strangers... about books! It was called the American Brit Classic Lit club and I loved it. The first book I read with them was Howards End by E.M Forster. Great book. And the online book club experience was wonderful.

2000-ish: That book club became swallowed up by Yahoo Groups and died a slow death. Eventually, I joined another online club called The Book Spot. Raise your hand if you remember that one! I know some of you are out there! This book club read a variety of books, had fabulous leadership and I loved it.

2002: Because everyone in the online book club kept talking about it, I finally started writing down everything I read in a book journal. At the end of the year, I crunched numbers and wrote lists. For the first time ever, I had an idea of how many books I actually read, and what sorts of books ended up on my lists year after year. It made me crazy that I hadn't started doing this sooner.

2003: I visited a friend, we talked books the whole time, and she said as I was leaving, "Hey, I'm going to start a book club, want to come?" And so began my first real live face to face book group. For our first book we read My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.

2004: The next year, my own neighborhood wanted to start a book club too, so somehow I ended up in charge and somehow I gradually and completely took over.Having my own book club was something I had thought about for years, and now it was finally a reality.

2005: Right around this time I decided to take my book love to a new level, meaning, I would stop fighting against it. Up to this point, I felt like I was holding back, feeling guilty, feeling shy, etc. I'm not sure what happened, but I decided finally, once and for all, to stop being shy about my love for books, to read as much as I wanted to, to add to my TBR list without worry, to read more than one book at a time, to talk to people about books... and.... just do it! It was very cathartic, actually.

2006: I started blogging at Yahoo's 360. I'd thought about blogging for a long long time, but it sounded scary. My sister invited me to join 360, so I tried it and loved it. However, I kept trying to talk about books there, and was completely ignored, for the most part. It was frustrating.

2007: About a year later, I noticed in my online groups, which I was still participating in though the groups had changed over the years, that everyone was talking about blogs, and everyone seemed to have a Blogger blog... so I caved (after pondering the idea, yet again, for months) and created It's All About Books. My first attempts included participating in Booking Through Thursday, and joining a couple of challenges. Also, this was the first year I reached the 100 books read at the end of the year mark. How could I start blogging and yet read more books than ever before.... in the same year?

2008: I dropped all the Yahoo groups. Sad, I know. But I switched completely over to the whole blogging thing and challenges (which are like book clubs really) and decided to not worry about the Yahoo online groups anymore. Also, I started keeping track of the stats on my blog, just to see what was happening. This year I also started going to author events and signings... something I'd never done before.

2009: As I mentioned in the other post, I became a little less shy about participating in blogging things this past year. I saw my blog numbers increase and made more and more friends. As for reading, I've gone from going to the library just to see what jumps out at me to read ten years ago, to now having stacks and stacks of TBR books every where and a list a mile long in my head of what to read next. It's insane how it's changed.

It's been a fun, wild ride, and I can't wait to see what the next ten years will bring in all things bookish! It's going to be great!