Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Top Ten Tuesday: Picture of Me


This week's Top Ten Tuesday at The Broke and the Bookish is a little different, and a lot of fun.  The objective?  To come up with the Top Ten Posts On Your Blog That Would Give The BEST Picture of YOU (as a reader and a person).  I've been blogging for quite a while now, and this was a great opportunity to take a walk down memory lane and see what posts put me on display.  It would have been easy to pull out only miscellanous posts and no reviews, but, looking back on things, some of these reviews, typical as they may have seemed at the time of their writing, were defining moments for me as a reader and a blogger, so I decided to balance the miscellany with the reviews.  I'm looking forward to getting to know other participants by way of their 10 posts.  Without further ado...

1. An Ode to Quotation Marks - In which one of my bookish pet peeves is explored dramatically and at length.

2. A Stolen Child by Keith Donohue - Do you ever have that moment when you're writing a review and somehow you stumble onto the heart of a book even though you didn't realize you knew it?  That's what this review felt like.

3. Feed Reader My Enemy, Feed Reader My Friend - This post is just timeless.  I wrote this years ago, and I still feel this way about my feed reader and probably always will.  It's so me, really.

4. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness - Everybody I know loved this book.  I tried to write a real review of it, but decided it would be better to go the more candid route with it.  I ended up being super happy with how it came out because, somehow, it more coherently summed up my feelings about the book than it would have if I'd taken the normal review approach.

5. An Open Letter to W. Somerset Maugham - Just a clever little letter to the writer of my most-loathed required reading ever.  So much fun to write!

6. Aberrations by Penelope Przekop - This was, I think, the first book that was ever offered to me for review, and, as it so happens, this is the first negative review I wrote of a book that was sent to me for review.  Nobody likes doing it, but I think writing a successful and balanced review of a book that you really didn't love is a major milestone in the life of a book blogger who wants to have any "street cred" at all, and I'm still kind of proud of myself for getting over that hump, and fairly early on, too.

7. The Leafy Awards 2009 and 2008 - Nothing's more me than the Leafy Awards.  They're random, gushy, and (I'm told) occasionally hilarious.   They're not so much me unplugged as maybe me...unhinged, giving out my reading honors for the year in unique form.  Of the comments from authors that I've gotten, most of them were on the Leafys, not on those nice, well thought-out reviews I wrote of their books long before the Leafys, but on these posts, where I'm happily making an @$$ of myself offering up goofy honors.  LOL!

8. Black Wave by John and Jean Silverwood - That stat hound in me loves this post.  It's another fair and balanced review of a book that didn't make much of an impression on me.  Regardless of my feelings for the book, though, these people are all, like, famous from being on shows like "I Shouldn't Be Alive," ergo, this sucker is still driving hits to my blog like whoa.

9. Here's to Borders 120 - My weirdly personal tribute to the one bookstore to ever employ me, that now, sadly, is no more.   It was only 6 months...of the best job ever.

10. A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray - I really got all lit crit-y on this one in a good way.  It's my most thumbs upped review on LibraryThing.  I may be somewhat proud of it.  Yes, actually, yes I am. 

What posts on your blog are the most you?

5 comments:

  1. I did mine a lot like you did. I know what you mean by hitting something in a review you didn't really think about at first.

    Beth ^_^
    http://sweetbooksnstuff.blogspot.com/

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  2. Hehe, love these posts. They really gave an inside to who you are and what your blog is like!

    I blogged for this week's TTT too! :) http://rachelwritesthings.blogspot.com/2012/08/top-ten-posts-that-describe-me.html

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  3. There's nothing like a title containing the words "most loathed" to produce a click. :)

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  4. This is a great topic for Top Ten Tuesday!

    I like your leafy's too - thanks for sharing these posts.

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  5. I don't think I could whittle my list to 10. ;)

    I hear you on Google Reader. It's evil--I'm convinced. These days I mostly just hop around from blog to blog or email myself links from twitter to read later when I have a free minute.

    Hmmm--punctuation, huh?

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