I've been thinking about the direction of this blog a lot lately, and what I want to do with it and what I want it to be. Don't worry--I'm not going anywhere and I don't plan on making any drastic changes. But, as you've probably noticed, I haven't been blogging much lately, due to my school commitments (senior year of college and all that) and I do want to go to grad school, so I don't see my schedule clearing up suddenly for all things blog and YA, as much as I would love it to.
I can never get away from the YA book world--I love it, I want to always be a reader and blogger, and I know that one day that I will be one of the authors, but keeping up on all of the books and news can be exhausting, and for a long time I thought I HAD to do it in order to be good at blogging. There are three things that have changed my mind about this. First, my job at the bookstore (I work at a small indie called
Great Lakes Books). There is a surprising difference between what my customers love at the bookstore and what my blogger friends and the people of Twitter love. Certainly there is a ton of overlap, and I love it when that happens, but it also made me realize that sometimes the books with the most noise online aren't what my customers want to read, and that made me feel better about not wanting to read them myself.
Second, I read about fifty pages of about five highly anticipated books that blogger friends have been raving over, and...eh. I felt so guilty over it because some authors I really liked, some of the books looked quite interesting, but I just couldn't get into them. And then I've read a handful of really excellent books that have flown under the radar and shared them with customers and blog readers, and they've reminded me why I love blogging and why I started doing this in the first place--to talk about books that I love when there really isn't a place to talk about them or a conversation already started.
The third thing was Lev Grossman's
article in Time about book reviewers. I love how he is unapologetic for not being able to read everything and like everything. It made me think about what I do, reaffirmed my faith in my method for picking out the books I want to read, and helped me realize that there is room for everyone on the internet to express their opinions, but that doesn't mean we have to like the same things.
I'm going to do my best to keep blogging as regularly as possible, but when I do blog, it's going to be about books I love, books I read for class that I think are important, writing YA, and those authors I think are really cool. I'm not going to be cover everything that falls into those categories--I wish I could, but I can't. But, I want to extend another heartfelt thank you to those of you that read this blog, whether you comment or not. I appreciate you and your support, and I appreciate the fact that, like me, you love books and reading. You all rock.