Happy Blogoversary to Me!

My first post came about on January 17, 2007, so today marks my fifth year blogging. My first post on a book was a collection of quotes and thoughts inspired by Yann Martel's The Life of Pi. Since that time, I have reviewed over 300 books and written 918 total blog posts: 64 in 2007, 33 in 2008, 264 in 2009, 335 in 2010, and 222 in 2011. As you can see, it wasn't until 2009 that my blogging really took off, and that was entirely because I found the book blogging community.

Research suggests that I have right around 650 followers, and apparently most people get to my site through Google searches and Google Reader. Okay, so that's all the energy I have for stats-like stuff. I am more interested in saying the following...

Blogging has changed my life. From middle school through college, I was an avid reader of a variety of books, enjoying Nora Roberts, Shakespeare, and Hunter Thompson equally. Once I got out of college and Real Life set in, my reading took a decided turn towards the easy. I primarily read romance novels with some sort of mystery-horror thrown in from time to time. I was reading just as much as before (if not more) but I certainly wasn't straining my brain and I wasn't reading a very diverse group of books as I had before. I think my problem was primarily that I had no one to talk to about books. Once I found a new community of readers, I fell back into my old habits easily, and I feel that I am an even more diverse reader now than I was back in college.

And it's all due to you wonderful bloggers out there who introduce me to new books, talk about old ones with me, encourage me to read outside my comfort zone, and in general be totally awesome. Thank you so much, and I hope the next five years are just as awesome as the first.