Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Armchair BEA 2016, Day 1: Introductions

Y'all get a two-fer today, because I NEED to have my book reviews on Wednesdays, and I couldn't wait to talk about about Democracy in Black, so uh....deal, I guess??

1. What is the name you prefer to use? I mean it's pretty obvious what my actual name is, so you can use that, or you can use Kokoba, or K or Kat or anything else you want? The topic of Internet names and handles is super complicated and interesting to me, so that will probably be a future Talky Tuesday post. But not today!


2. How long have you been a book blogger? NEVAR I RESIST YOUR INSISTENCE THAT I NICHE/SINCE BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, take your pick. I don't think of myself as a book blogger as such, but I read a lot and I like to write about what I read, so I end up blogging about books! Sometimes! (If you take a look around, you'll notice pretty quickly that this is a blog that isn't only about books.) Before I had this blog (which I started back in 2008? 2009?), I was on LiveJournal (remember the 90s????) and I definitely wrote about books I loved and hated there, so...this is a tough question to answer.


3. Have you participated in ABEA before?  I did in 2014? I didn't in 2015 because I was in the middle of a chaotic lead-up to a huge road trip along the American West Coast. But this year my May is wide open! My years might be wrong, maybe. I might have participated in 2013, too? I don't know!

Not that I regret my trip because I TOUCHED A REDWOOD TREE!

4.  Do you have a favorite book? Do I have a favorite book? Child...


My two all-time nostalgia faves are Walden and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but that does not even begin to encompass the depth or breadth of my magnificent hipster-with-a-BA-in-English literary tastes.


5. If you could recommend one other book blogger, who would it be and why? Ugh, to be honest, my book blog feed sometimes...runs into each other? I feel like most of the people I follow end up morphing into like this Book Blogger Megazord, even though I follow quite a few. I want to say that Wildmoo Books, River City Reading, and The Book Wheel manage to find the kind of stuff that I'm the most interested in (which is to say beyond YA) (not that I'm hating but if I read only YA I would be miserable, but that seems to be what gets the attention in the book blog world). Oh, and also Shaina Reads. And Reading The End! Also Natalie should review more books because anytime she lets the hate flow I have a good lol.


6. Which day of ABEA are you looking forward to the most? I have literally no idea what's coming! Surprise me!! (I like the Twitter chats, though. Hopefully my schedule will allow for that this year!)


7.  How do you arrange your bookshelves? Is there a rhyme or reason? Or not at all? #ImmigrantLife means that most of my library is in boxes at my parents' house, and will stay there until we move into a bigger apartment. I have one shelf (not like one bookcase....like, one shelf in a bookcase) right now and it's sorted into fiction and non-fiction, with fiction sorted by author's last name and non-fiction sorted to what I remember of the Dewey decimal system. My shelves before I moved were sorted this way, except the Dewey decimal system was exact because I was really persnickety about it.


9 comments:

  1. I feel the same way about the book blogs I follow, plus there are so MANY >_< I'm thinking about making a separate Bloglovin' (or something) account so I can keep book blogs separate from other blogs. Idk. I'm hoping I can do some of the Twitter chats this year, in the past they've always been at weird times for me D':

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    1. One of them one year was at a great time for me, the other....not so much. Time zones, y'all.

      It doesn't help that stuff like NetGalley etc. means that bloggers seem to end up talking about the same books at about the same time....

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    2. Yeah, that bugs me too. If I see 10+ bloggers on my feed writing about the same book at the same time I'm turned off before I even know what it's about. Which totally isn't fair, but whatever >_>

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  2. Walden is a wonderful book. I have never read Hitchhiker. It's been on my TBR list for years. Happy Reading!

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    1. There seems to be a sudden backlash against Walden, and I guess it's warranted -- here's this dude who can kind of afford to be a weirdo, and overstay his company at dinners and sneer at society but still go into town and do his laundry, preaching these ideas of self-reliance, and I get that he's been coopted by a political movement that I think is kind of scary, but still I like Walden and I like Thoreau. Not everyone can totally or even partially drop out of society, but we can all feel a little better by embracing our weirdnesses and idiosyncracies. That's what I always loved about Walden, at any rate: it's okay to be you in all your weirdness.

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  3. Thanks for the shoutout! It's always nice to know that someone actually reads the books I recommend :)

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    1. I can't say for sure if I've read something you've recommended yet, but you've definitely found enough interesting things that I just associate your blog with "throw it on the TBR." Once I finish my TIME Top 100 Novels project, the next one is probably going to clear out the ridiculous backlog that is my GoodReads "want to read" shelf. After I found book bloggers and book blogger events, it kind of got out of control.

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  4. I used to be really really precise about my bookshelves... You would not want to see them now. lol

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    1. Everything else in my living space (and life) is a mess, but my books NEED to be in order. That's just how it is.

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