About this Blog

Why this blog?

For as long as I can remember my Mother has loved to read. I can hardly remember a time where she did not have an active book on the coffee table or her kindle. This is a love that she shared with all her three children. Our house was a house filled with books and learning.

We were always encouraged to read, but never forced. Books weren’t gifts for special occasions and they were always paid for by our parents (even though I now see as an adult a healthy reading habit is not a cheap one) without question. My mother even designed a reading log where if I could track my reading and turn in reading hours for some pocket money. My hours reading books about bionicles funded my always growing collection of lego models.

Then throughout middle school my mother supported us kids through a program called “Battle of the Books” where 10-13 year old students would read a list of approximately 30 books and compete on trivia related to these books. My brother and I each year read 10-15 of the list struggling to remember the characters and plots. To support us our mother read them all, every year.

Once I hit the angsty years of high school and early college I lost track of my reading habit. Through college and the start of my adult life I prioritized spending time with friends and playing video games over reading (although I did adopt a healthy audio book habit). It didn’t seem like a big deal because during this time I lived near my parents and visited often (although in hindsight not as much as I could have).

Then, a couple of years ago I took a big step with my career and decided to move to France from North Carolina, taking me far from my family. The first year everything was so new and amazing it was hard to keep up, but now that I have settled into the new culture I’ve found time to discover my old hobbies like reading. Throughout this rediscovery my Mom has again been a stout supporter of the habit, discussing my recent reads on our weekly calls or taking me book shopping when I visit every few months.

This peaked in spectacular fashion recently when, for my most birthday my Mom took gift giving to the extreme, as she always has, and sent me a care package of my entire 2023 reading list, over 30 books. It is as a thank you for this gift, and for the gift of her lifelong support of me and our shared hobby that I am making this website. I hope that through sharing my thoughts on all my recent reads that I can strengthen my connection with my mother despite living thousands of miles apart.

How this Blog is Written

I am not a blogger, I’ve never been a strong user of social media, and I have a nice understanding of English, but I struggle to write things that are deep without sounding pretentious. What I am is an engineer. This post is to explain how I plan to write my book reviews in the hope that my blunt and possibly blocky method of writing might be ignored for the value of the content.

Each review in this blog will hopefully follow the same format that may slightly evolve over time based on what I decide is important to include or not. The following sections will be included in each page.

Why I read this

This section is meant to explain why/who might be interested in reading each book. My goal is to share my thought process so that it can be clear what motivated me to pick up this book and invest my time in reading it.

What I learned

This section is possible the most important. I do not plan to include in my reviews a summary of the book. You can get that from the Amazon page. For me, what is important when reading a book is to actively think about what you are reading and what can be learned from it (I know many people read to relax, and I do too, but it is just such a wasted opportunity to read for hours and not have some dedicated reflection!).

What I didn’t like

Now I am no critic or expert, but I believe that no book is truly perfect. Moreover, I think there isn’t much discussion to be had with someone who can say “this book was perfect and not a single flaw”, ok what do I say to that? I think this will be my most challenging section for this blog since I hope to read many highly acclaimed books, and who am I to critique Shakespeare or Dickens, hell I’m not even sure I’m qualified to critique Rowling or King.

Questions I asked

Again, my objectives in this blog lie heavily in starting discussion. I want to ask the thoughtful questions these authors put so much effort into provoking and then to discuss them. Already in my first few books, fiction or non-fiction, I am constantly finding ideas that challenge how I think or the way the world is. To find any of the answers I think defining the questions is pretty important.

My Favorite Quote

This one is pretty selfish. I think it is so interesting to be able to quote literature (although definitely pretentious), and I want that ability to sound smart about the books I read. I also want to challenge myself to find one phrase or sentence or section that summarizes the most important themes of the books or the ideas of the authors.

Books I liked like this one

Finally, I want to be able to support future reading activity with this blog. I want to be able to link the books I read together and see what patterns emerge. This section is going to have many repeats as I begin this blog, but I hope through the years that this section will grow into a large library of available books that I follow like a path through my experiences and growth.

With that I believe this blog is ready to be read. Like I said, I am not a blogger or big on social media, so this will be a constant effort for me, but I am happy to have the proper motivation to make something to share with my Mom and my family. That if for some reason this sparks the interest of others down the line so be it, I’d be happy to discuss my reading with anyone.