Allow me to reintroduce myself

The authoress

Hi everyone!! It’s been a minute!

So, once upon a time, I started a blog. That was back in 2007, and I called it The Bluestocking Guide. I called it that for two reasons. First, I always thought of myself as a bluestocking—a woman with strong literary interests—because I loved to read. And second, I called it a guide because I was going to be posting reviews of the books I was reading. If somebody was looking for something new to read, they could hop onto my page and see what I thought. The blog also had a tagline:

Reviews by a Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant Reader.

Everything about that tagline was tongue-in-cheek. I was partial to certain books, particularly science fiction and fantasy. I was prejudiced because I like what I like, and there are certain types of books I look down upon—and I am not embarrassed to admit it. And an ignorant reader?

Well. I’m anything but ignorant.

The tagline was inspired by Jane Austen’s The History of England, which she wrote when she was a teenager and described as being written “By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian.” I always thought that was one of the funniest things in the world. So naturally, I stole it. Well, adapted it.

My first blog was on Blogger. I knew absolutely nothing about websites. I was just winging the entire thing. I wrote my first posts, published them, and then discovered something rather distressing: Nobody was reading them. At the time I had a couple hundred Facebook friends, and I remember thinking, Wait a minute. Nobody is reading this? So I tried emailing people. Maybe they would read it. Maybe they would comment. Maybe we could get some sort of book discussion going. That did not particularly happen either.

Then, at some point, I noticed that some book-review sites had books before they were even published. And I thought:

Wait. How are they doing that? I would LOVE to do that.

That was how I discovered advance review copies, or ARCs. The first ARC I ever received was, I believe, A Flaw in the Blood by Stephanie Barron. Stephanie Barron, if you aren’t familiar with her, is the nom de plume of Francine Mathews and the author of the Jane Austen mystery series, which I absolutely loved. I remember getting that first advance copy and thinking:

Oh my goodness. This is amazing.

From there, things started to snowball. I joined some sort of online directory—I cannot remember the name of it now—where people with blogs and various interests could list themselves and share posts. I picked up a few readers there. And then, somehow, I stumbled into the book blogosphere.

And that was a whole world.

There were places to find ARCs. At one point I was following people who worked for Hachette and receiving review copies from them. There were reading challenges. There were weekly memes. There was R.I.P.—Readers Imbibing Peril every October, when everyone read horror, Gothic fiction, thrillers, mysteries, paranormal fiction, and anything else suitably creepy. There were Teaser Tuesdays, Musing Mondays, Friday Finds, and seemingly a challenge for every conceivable type of book. There was an actual community built around reading. And it changed what I read. When I started The Bluestocking Guide, I was a hardcore Star Trek and Star Wars reader. I read fantasy as well, but science fiction was very much my thing. Through book blogging, however, I started trying books I probably never would have picked up otherwise. That was how I found dystopian fiction like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series. I discovered Marie Bostwick and her Cobbled Court Quilt series—and eventually met her more than once. I read J. Scott Savage’s Farworld series. I discovered authors, genres, and books I probably never would have encountered if I hadn’t been watching what everybody else was reading. Which probably explains how I eventually ended up with more than a thousand books.

I also had my own rather elaborate rating system. It was inspired, at least in part, by the grades J.K. Rowling created for the O.W.L.s in the Harry Potter books. But instead of trying to assign a book some supposedly objective number of stars, my ratings were really intended to answer a different question:

How did this book make me feel when I closed it?

And because I apparently cannot do anything simply, the rating system became rather extensive.

The Bluestocking Rating System

S — Can’t Get Enough of Your Sexy Wit The highest praise. I loved it. I may become irritating about it.

L — Loved It Exactly what it says on the tin.

LI — Like It I enjoyed it. Maybe I didn’t fall madly in love, but I was quite happy I read it.

E — Exceeded My Expectations I went into this expecting one thing and got something considerably better.

Q — Not Quite What I Expected. Not necessarily bad. Just not what I thought I was getting.

C — Conflicted. I have feelings. Unfortunately, some of them are fighting with the others.

D — Didn’t Hate It, But I Didn’t Like It Either The literary equivalent of a shrug.

I — Non-Habit-Forming Cure for Insomnia Self-explanatory.

W — Waste of Paper and Ink We have reached the bottom.

And then there were the supplemental ratings:

SP — Speechless. This could be very, very good or very, very bad. Context is everything.

G — Get On With the Plot Already Something needs to happen. Preferably before I strangle myself..

T — Trite You seem to be unacquainted with the term “original.”

The blog never became particularly large. At the time, I took that rather personally. I assumed it meant I simply wasn’t a very good writer. And, to be fair, I certainly did not sound like a lot of the other book bloggers. I enjoyed the books. I enjoyed writing about them. I enjoyed sharing what I thought. I wrote literary essays in addition to reviews. But it could be incredibly demoralizing to put all that work into something and feel as though very few people found it interesting enough to read, much less comment on. Eventually, I reached the point where I thought, Well. I suppose I’ll just keep slogging along.

And I did.

For years.

But then blogging itself began to change.

And I remember it feeling as though the change happened over night. One month, I might get what was—for me, anyway—a respectable number of comments on a post. And then the next month? Almost nothing. People actually started talking about a sort of blogging recession. There were campaigns encouraging people to go back to commenting on one another’s blogs because everybody had noticed the same thing: people were still around, but the conversations underneath the posts were disappearing. At roughly the same time, I started noticing something else. People were beginning to review books on YouTube.

And that was interesting to me because, by that point, I actually had a podcast called Inklings.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, the Inklings were the literary discussion group associated with writers including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They would get together, talk about literature, and read works in progress to one another.

Which sounded exactly like the sort of thing I wanted to do. The idea behind my Inklings podcast was that I would talk about books, hopefully have discussions with other readers, and interview authors. And I did. Some episodes actually did quite well. My interview with Steve Vander Ark, author of The Harry Potter Lexicon, was one of them. But for the most part, I kept hearing the same complaint about podcasts:

Who has time to listen to all that?

And people actually said this. There were comments about nobody having time to sit around listening to a podcast—even though you could download the episodes through Apple and listen whenever you wanted. Which is why I found what happened next rather fascinating. People started reviewing books on YouTube. And those same people who were complaining about not having time to listen to my podcast, were making time to watch a video and comment on it. To quote J. R.R. Tolkien,

The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.‍ ‍

Eventually, I started stepping back from book reviewing. Part of that was simply because the landscape was changing. But part of it was technological. I had started on Blogger, then moved my websites to iWeb, which I loved when it worked. The problem was that iWeb could be an absolute nightmare technically, and on more than one occasion I ended up having to rebuild enormous portions of my site. Then Apple discontinued iWeb. I moved to RapidWeaver and eventually had my own dedicated site, and later I ended up back on WordPress. By that point, though, I had begun to run out of steam. Life was getting busier. My job was getting busier. I stopped requesting advance review copies. I stopped participating in the weekly memes because many of the memes themselves were disappearing. There weren’t as many blog hops. People weren’t commenting the way they used to.

It felt as though everybody was abandoning the blogosphere. n reality, of course, people weren’t necessarily abandoning the internet. They were moving. To YouTube. To Instagram. Eventually, to TikTok.

At the time, I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to follow everybody there. And meanwhile, I was acquiring other interests. I started knitting, so for a while I had a knitting blog. Then I got into cake decorating, so naturally there was a cake-decorating blog. Then I bought my first house, started gardening, and gardening eventually became an enormous part of my life—and ultimately a business.

But I never stopped reading.

But I wasn’t reading at the same volume I once had, and even the way I read began to change. I discovered audiobooks. And audiobooks were perfect because, as it turns out, it is extremely difficult to knit and turn pages at the same time. The same goes for sewing, gardening, and any number of other things I apparently decided I needed to occupy myself with. So for the last several years, most of my reading has actually been listening. Every once in a while I buy a physical book. I own some e-books. But audiobooks have become my primary format.

And then something strange started happening.

I would go into Barnes & Noble, and Barnes & Noble no longer felt like home. That was bizarre to me. There was a time when I could walk into Barnes & Noble and immediately recognize books I had been hearing about for months. I knew what everybody was reviewing. I knew what was coming out. I knew which books had suddenly become the book everybody was talking about. n Now I would walk in, look around, and think:

I have absolutely no idea where to start.

I had stopped following book blogs. Many of the blogs I used to follow had disappeared entirely. Google had shut down Google Reader, which had once been where I kept track of everybody.nnI was still receiving emails from Shelf Awareness, but I had mostly stopped reading them. So I gradually spent less and less time browsing bookstores. When I wanted fiction, I tended to fall back on authors and series I already knew: Star Trek novels, Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness series, and other writers I had been reading for years.

And I realized recently that I miss the rest of it. I miss discovering something I never would have thought to read. I miss knowing which books are coming. I miss waiting for the next book in a series. And, somewhat surprisingly, I miss reviewing them. Because The Bluestocking Guide was never only about telling other people what I thought. It was also my reading record. My synopses were ridiculously detailed—and deliberately so. If the next book in a series appeared a year or two later and I found myself thinking, What on earth happened in the last one?, I could go back to my own review, read the synopsis, and refresh my memory.bbSometimes I had written an essay about the book as well, and I could go back and read that too. It became my own little literary reference library.

And I miss having it.

Unfortunately, the old WordPress setup simply never made me want to get back into it. It always felt like more work than I wanted to do. But now I’ve rebuilt The Bluestocking Guide on Squarespace, as part of a larger site that lets me keep all of my various interests under one roof. And suddenly I find myself wanting to do this again. I’ve started paying attention to Shelf Awareness again. I’ve started following some of the people and sites I used to follow. I’ve already found books I want to read.

And, apparently, Bluestocking has returned. So, for those of you who weren’t here the first time around:

Hi.

I’m Bluestocking.

My favorite corner of literature is probably speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, paranormal fiction, and all the strange things that live somewhere in between.

I love a good mystery.

I particularly love a good cozy mystery.

I love Jane Austen.

I love Agatha Christie.

I love J.K. Rowling.

And I have been known to develop very strong opinions about fictional people.

There will be new reviews here.

There will also be some of my old reviews and essays coming out of the archives, because after going back and reading them for the first time in years, I discovered something rather surprising:

Some of them are actually pretty good.

Who knew?

So welcome—or welcome back—to The Bluestocking Guide.

Hopefully, while you’re here, you find something good to read.