I’ve been book blogging now for just over two years, which i came to realise recently is quite a bit chunk of my very short life so far. I started book blogging with very little idea of what i was doing, and very much got involved head first. I think blogging changes the way everyone looks at the thing they’re blogging about. So here’s a chat about what blogging has changed for me.
Without a doubt, i think book blogging changes any reader. For me personally, i’ve started to read with a lot more structure. Before i started blogging, i read whatever i wanted to which meant picking up the book that i was most interested in at the time and just started reading. I didn’t have to worry about challenges, reading targets or any kind of promotion deadline. So when i got a lot more serious about blogging, i had to factor in what promotion i had coming up, how much time it would take me to read something and be a lot more picky about what i was advertising to people. I also had to take in to account the amount of new releases that were hitting shelves left-right and center.
This means that when i started to read a book, i was very conscience (at the start of my book blogging journey at least) about what i was reading and how long that book had been in the world. There is an immense pressure on bloggers to keep up with trends and to make sure that your posts are the most relevant they could be, which means making sure you had your hands on the latest Rainbow Rowell novel to have a review up mere days after publication. In reality, this is a very unrealistic way of reading. There is no way that someone can keep up with all the popular releases that were being talked about, as well as keeping up with an actual blog.
I came to realise quite quickly that i’d have to be quite picky about what i wanted to read. This realisation came in the form of me looking over all the books i’d collected in the few years previous to blogging and thinking to myself ‘literally only half of these are relevant now.’ Which sadly resulted in a pretty big book unhaul of all things i’d lost interest in. Having a blog makes your perception of reading change. I lost sense of what i wanted to read and what i thought i should be reading. I think i ended up falling quite deeply in to the ‘what i should be reading’ category (and to be honest, haven’t really left).
Starting the blog mostly changed how i actually read a book. It made me very critical of what i was reading, constantly analysing parts that were good and bad and making notes of what i thought i could talk about in a review. Pretty quickly i found that this sucked all the fun out of reading that i once loved so much. It made me drift from the story every chapter to write something down that i wanted to talk about, ruining the enjoyment of the story i was reading. In the last year i found a way of combating this which is using sticky tabs in pretty much every book i’ve read, marking parts i like as i go along. Not only is this is really useful aspect for looking back on for reviews, but it’s great on a personal level that i know i can flick back to a part of a book i really liked with ease.
Being a blogger has definitely changed a lot of my reading habits, for better or worse i don’t know yet. However, it’s given me a lot of opportunities to improve my reading habits and also find new books from so many different genres i would have never introduced myself too. Sometimes that pressure to read the new release in a completely different genre is the push you need to find something you might like.
The Little Contemporary Corner 