In creating this blog, Kim and I set out to support independent bookstores by showcasing the ones we’ve visited and encouraging people to shop locally. That’s still our goal.
Turns out, though, that it’s hard to talk about bookstores without, at least occasionally, talking about, you know . . . books.
A long time ago, Kim discovered that if she asked the owner or employee of an independent bookstore to recommend a book to her, she’d wind up bringing home something she might never have stumbled upon on her own and (more often than not) really enjoy it. It also always gave her insight into the leanings and interests of that particular bookstore and of the area it resided in, so now, when she reviews a bookstore for the blog, she always mentions the books she discovered thanks to the people who work there.
Kim also came up with the idea of our posting “recommended reading” for various holidays and milestone events that occur. And when the new children’s series The 39 Clues came out, Kim realized we should have some mention of that–same goes for big book releases, like the last of the Twilight series.
(If you’ve been reading this blog fairly steadily, it will come as no surprise to you that Kim is the idea man behind pretty much everything. I’d say I’m the worker bee of the team, except she does more work on it, too. I’m hopeful I contribute something valuable to the blog, but haven’t figured out yet what that is–I’m waiting for Kim to tell me.)
Anyway, it occurred to Kim (see?) that since we end up mentioning, describing and sometimes reviewing specific books in a lot of our posts, we should make it easy for someone to see what we had to say about them by keeping a running list of books with a link back to the original posts in which they appeared. And thus a new page was born, with the exciting new title of “reviewed books.”
Okay, the title isn’t exciting, but we’re pleased that now our readers can open up our new page and find a list of books organized alphabetically by title and immediately link to what we had to say about any specific one. The list should grow pretty quickly. We may even start posting extra reviews of books that have really spoken to us in some way or another. Because the truth is that our love of bookstores comes out of that first, original, and deeply felt love for the written word.
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