BBAW Interview Swap!

Posted by: Redhead on: September 13, 2011

• In: BBAW | interviews | Uncategorized
• 15 Comments

If you’re a book blogger, know a book blogger, read a book blogger, or simply think that book blogs are cool, post this as your status.  oh, wait, this isn’t facebook?  😉

but it’s still Book Blogger Appreciation Week!

My favorite book blogger appreciation week event (and actually, the only one I participate in) is the interview swap.  It’s super fun and easy, you sign up, and they partner you up with another awesome blogger to chat with a bit.  kinda like match.com, but for bloggers, and like, not romantic?  My partner this year is the hilarious Alison from Piling on the Books.   You can read her interview with me on her site, and while you’re over there, make sure to check out her Wizard of Oz blog posts. Alison is teh soopah cool. and i got to interview her!

It must be heaven working in a library, surrounded by all those books!  How has being at the library affected how you blog and what books you read?
Oh my word, I have got to stop working at a library (not really!).  I did a post about a month and a half ago about thirteen booksI had brought home from the library after cataloging them, and I’m just about ready to put up another one!  That’s crazy but also good, because for a while I was only reading books that I had already read a review of, and I find it very exciting to delve into a book without someone else’s opinion coloring my view.  It’s also fun to be the first person to read and persuade others to read an awesome book!

more with Alison, after the jump!

I see your blog is a few years old. How has it evolved since you started it?

Um, a lot.  🙂  This blog is, what, three years old now, but it really started as a project in 2006 to get some reading done over my summer break in undergrad.  I put up a list of things I wanted to read (comprised mostly of the complete works of Shakespeare, which I didn’t even make a dent in!) and kept track of what I actually did read.  The next year I just kept track of what I finished, and added little summaries to help me remember the books in the future, and then in 2008 I graduated and realized that my summer reading project could be a year-round thing!  There is a pretty marked difference between those summer and fall posts, and my posts have only gotten longer and snarkier since then.

Tell me about your favorite book that you’ve read in the last 12 months, and one you are looking forward to.

I’m going to pick two favorites, because I have read a LOT of books in the last 12 months and because they are favorites for different reasons.  I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad because it is amazingly well put together — Egan manages to combine all of these disparate narratives and narrative styles into one coherent book, and she trusts the reader to put it all together instead of piling on exposition, like I would have to if I wrote this book!  But I’m also a big fan of books that are just absolutely fun, and like I said in January when I read it, Will Grayson, Will Graysonis a strong contender for Best Book I Will Read All Year. It is hilarious and it is weird and it is true and now I want to go read it again.

what’s your favorite part about book blogging?

I really love being able to tell everyone about what I’m reading.  I do it to pretty much everyone I know already, but with my blog I can do it to the WHOLE WORLD.  I’m sure the world is like, “Uh, thanks.”  I also like that I am included in the whole world, and when I’m trying to remember whether I liked a book or not or whyI liked a book or not, I can go back to my blog and see what I thought — which is not always the same thing I think months later!

if you could visit anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Well, I can visit anywhere in the world, excepting I suppose North Korea and other such places, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet!  But I will share with you a nerdy travel plan: my husband and I haven’t gone on our honeymoon yet (and we’ll be married two years on the 19th!), but when we have the money and the time our plan is to go to a town called Donnybrook in Australia wherein, Google Maps tells us, resides the only intersection of Alison and Scott (our names, of course) in the Google-mapped world.  And then we’ll go see other cool things in Australia, maybe.  🙂

Tags: BBAW, blogging, interviews