Celebrating...

Everyone is celebrating New Year's Eve tonight, but I am also celebrating the one year anniversary of this blog. I went from writing about everything (movies, restaurants, music) to narrowing my focus to my true passion -- books and reading. I began that journey before I actually decided to do it, with two blog entries based on an assignment for a library science class I was taking. For that assignment, each student had to keep a bibliography of everything they read that semester.

Our professor gave us minimums we had to meet, and most people struggled to read that number of books. I, on the other hand, read far and above that number. In the end, I didn't write up every single book I read; it just got to be too much. But I also enjoyed some of that writing about books and reading, and I realized I would probably get much more enjoyment out of having a blog that was based on books rather than continuing the blog I was currently doing (which was all over the place and about many different things). Also, I began to write much more frequently after I felt a purpose behind my blogging. Now, I often can't wait to finish a book, simply so I can write about it on this blog!

I've increased my blog entries per month from one or two, to four or five, to now nine or ten. Hopefully, 2010 will see good things continue to happen, more literature to read, and much book discussion.


Some of my favorite reading quotes to ring in the New Year, and to celebrate one year and counting:

• ""Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." -- Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird
• "When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began." -- Rita Mae Brown, author of the Mrs. Murphy cat mystery series
• "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." -- Emilie Buchwald
• "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." -- T. S. Eliot, poet of the American modernist movement
• "Read, read, read." -- William Faulkner, author of classic novels such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
• "When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes." -- Erasmus, Catholic priest and theological writer
• "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was." -- Ernest Hemingway, American writer and journalist
• "For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives." -- Amy Lowell, American poet
• "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting." -- Lady M. W. Montague, English writer
• "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." -- Anna Quindlen, Newsweek contributor and author of novels such as Black and Blue and Blessings
• "The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself." -- Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States of America
• "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." -- J. D. Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye