Tag: 10th Blogiversary

Since I can’t imagine that I’ll be around for the 111th anniversary, I’m going to use this occasion to bastardize a certain writer of a travelogue/memoir on his eleventy-first birthday.

My dear People, My dear Bagginses and Boffins, and my dear Tooks and Brandybucks, and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots. Also my readers, authors, and other bloggers I welcome you back again to The Irresponsible Reader. Today is the blog’s eleventh anniversary: Eleven years of blogging about reading irresponsibly!

I hope you are all enjoying yourselves as much as I am. I shall not keep you long. I have called you all together for a Purpose. Indeed, for Three Purposes!

First of all, to tell you that I am immensely fond of you all, and that eleven years is too short a time to blog among such excellent and admirable hobbits and readers.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.*

Secondly, to celebrate my anniversary. It’s been 11 years and 5,065 posts, 2 template facelifts, 2 webhosts, thousands and thousands of pages read, and hundreds and hundreds of hours of listening.

If I may be allowed to refer to ancient history, my arrival on the Internet by this name wasn’t an auspicious arrival–and not terribly readerly, either, that started the next day. As I’ve noticed with my reposts this week, I wasn’t terribly wordy then, but I’ve largely recovered from that.

I wish to make an ANNOUNCEMENT.

I regret to announce that – eleven is far too short a time to spend among you – this is the NOT END. I am going nowhere. I am NOT leaving NOW.

This is NOT GOOD-BYE!

* Not true…but you can’t mess with that line.

Okay, I can’t torture Tolkien’s wording enough to get this in, but it’s the most important part:

I’ve had a blast doing this. I’ve read so many great things—many, many things I’d never have even heard of without this blog. I’ve corresponded with more great authors than I can think of—and best of all, there’s you readers.

I want to thank all of you for your time, your comments, your support (particularly through the whole recent cancer/surgery thing) your encouragement—and occasionally, your editing (I always appreciate it, I just regret the necessity). I assure you that every view, every like, every comment, every retweet, every email is encouraging and I can’t thank you enough. Hopefully, I’m saying that often enough.

Several years ago, back when (to borrow from Douglas Adams)

spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri

I found myself reading too quickly, without any reflection, or really thinking about it. I was practically binging non-stop. I’d end up checking out the same book from the library multiple times and wouldn’t understand why it felt so familiar (that’s when I started keeping a log). I didn’t like that. Authors deserved a reader who would take a beat and think about the book, who’d really appreciate their work. Also, what was the point of reading like I was just going through them like Pringles? What was the benefit to me (other than keeping me occupied)?

So I plunged into Goodreads, resolving to post something about every book I read, as a way to force myself to ruminate at least a little on what I was consuming. I wanted to soak it all in. But I largely didn’t have any Friends or Followers there and wasn’t good about finding people to interact with, so it was easy to take breaks from it and fall into old, sloppy habits.

I’d been blogging for over a decade in a few places—some related to theology and whatnot, and I had a personal blog about everything—I thought about putting my Goodreads reviews there, but no one seemed to read/care about any blog post I had about books. So why go to the trouble?

But I’d heard about book bloggers. It’s important for me to say this—I had never read a book blog at this point. But I liked the idea. If I’m just one voice in thousands on Goodreads, who notices if I don’t say anything? But if I’m the voice on a blog (even if only 3 people see it), it’ll be noticed that I stop.

I played around with a few templates, copied over a handful of my most recent Goodreads posts, and dug in with this post. After posting pretty regularly for a month or so, I started to tell people that I’d done it. But not many—I think I was up and running for about three months before I showed my wife! I just wanted to make sure I could do it regularly.

Then I started reading book blogs and tried to up my game.

10 years and 4,455 posts, 2 template facelifts, 2 webhosts, and thousands and thousands of pages read later, here we are.

More important than the numbers—I’ve had a blast doing this. I’ve read so many great things—many, many things I’d never have even heard of without this blog. I’ve corresponded with more great authors than I can think of—and best of all, there’s you readers.

I want to thank all of you for your time, your comments, your encouragement—and occasionally, your editing (I always appreciate it, I just regret the necessity). I assure you that every view, every like, every comment, every retweet, every email is encouraging and I can’t thank you enough. Hopefully, I’m saying that often enough.

(So I don’t get accused of plagiarism, or preparing myself…I borrowed some of this from my post Book Blogger Hop: My Book Blogger Origin Story)