Online Book Stuff Post the Second: In Which I Get Really Excited About Reading Lists

Thanks to Jamie at The Broke and the Bookish, today I discovered another book blog: A Striped Armchair, by Eva. I really like her writing style and I think our taste in books is quite similar, so this is another one I'll be trying to follow regularly.

On this blog, Eva has created a page entirely devoted to her yearly reading lists. They are insanely ambitious, for reasons she describes in her 'About' section. I doubt that I will ever be in a position to compete with that prolific list -- not that it's a competition or anything... But I really like the idea of using a blog page to post past and current reads.

I once estimated that I read around 30 books per semester as an undergraduate majoring in English literature and Anthropology, with other courses spanning Sociology, Political Science, Women's Studies, Linguistics, and more. A lot of those were textbooks or non-fiction books related to course work, but from second through fourth years, I took three English courses each semester and many of the texts I read were fiction. So I did manage to plow through a lot of novels and story collections during my university years -- and that doesn't include books I read for "fun" during summers or holidays.

Since then, my progress through reading lists has slowed down radically. In journalism school, I barely read anything that wasn't a newspaper, an online news source, or a textbook about Marshall McLuhan. (How much do I wish that Douglas Coupland's biography of McLuhan had been out in 2007? A lot.) As a post-grad, I was too busy looking for jobs and having pre-quarter-life crises to be able to wrap my head around serious lit-rah-chah. But when I am not reading, I miss it in a very tangible way. So despite having a full-time job and being an adult-type-person with real-life responsibilities, I am trying these days to spend more time reading and less time watching TV. I actually canceled my cable last month -- this is serious business.

Given everything I mentioned in my post yesterday about online book communities, I'm not sure posting a reading list on a blog page is any more interactive than the Excel list I keep on my laptop. (I wasn't kidding about the Excel list. My mother is a statistician -- lists are also serious business in our family.) But at least it allows me to share my picks with others, if not generating automatic recommendations from Indigo or publishers.

A friend of mine sent me a comment on Facebook after reading yesterday's post, saying she uses Wereads (formerly ireads) and had a good experience. If you use any of the book communities and have good or bad things to say, please let me know in the comments section.