Reflecting on 9 Years as a Book Blogger + Answering Your Questions on Reading Slumps

I looked up the other day and realized that it was March, and while I've never been great at keeping track of the exact date I launched Reading, Writing, and Me, I do know it was March of 2017, over Spring Break. So I did some backtracking through the archives, and my best guess was that I made the first post today, nine years ago. I surprised myself when I realized it really was nine years—I had to do the math a few times to be sure. I was talking to my mom about this nine years thing the other day, and she said that she still remembers fourteen-year-old me bounding into the room asking for permission to start a Blogger account, pitching that it would be good for my college applications as a way to sell her on letting me run wild on the internet. I was that young when this started, and now I'm a fully grown adult living on my own in a different country. 

Oftentimes, in the most recent years, I've glazed right over the blog anniversary. It's a hard, strange thing to celebrate in a way? Running the blog is my longest running job and was my first ever in a lot of ways. It's enabled every job I've had since. But in this day and dark age of the internet, it feels like the continued existence of any particular outpost is worth celebrating, and I do feel like this past year has been a monumental one for Reading, Writing, and Me full of both major milestones and new, exciting challenges. I thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect. 

For one, RWM is being read by more people than ever in more countries around the world than I could've fathomed. It makes sense for things to grow with time, but the growth that's happened over the last year is staggering. I never thought I'd get enough clicks a month to fill a stadium's worth of people. A lot of this is down to longevity, to my blog being trusted by google and moving up search rankings when people look for reviews of specific books. Particularly when the book hasn't received much broader coverage. I can see the posts people consistently love and the reviews that most often bring people here. But it doesn't all feel quite real. A blog, these days, is just a website. It doesn't function on the metrics of social media, or even Substack. Nobody is liking your posts and I get a handful of comments now and again, but it's not the norm. I'll get the occasional sweet email, and I have a sense of community on Bookstagram, but I look at these big numbers sometimes and struggle to understand how these are real readers trusting my opinions about books. 

Which brings me to a funny thing that happened the other day that reminded me of just how real this community is. My friend Zoie (who I'm in the M.Phil with) sent me a text after I'd suggested she check out Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell because she'd just loved a different story collection that had similar themes. Here's what she said: Lanie the funniest thing just happened, I googled Intimacies to read the premise again, and a review popped up so I clicked on it, read it, and was like wait this sounds so familiar, did Lucy Caldwell do another talk at an MFA? This is such a good review and I'm sold. And then I realized it was your blog. This was followed by many laugh cry emojis. 

I don't talk about my blog all that often IRL, and most people that know me don't read it. I wouldn't expect them to. Much like my writing career, the idea of it vaguely floats in the ether. But it was incredibly cool to have that reminder that all of the numbers that fill the stats box are people like Zoie who are googling books, looking to see if they should read something or what they should read next, and are finding the blog and hopefully coming back. This was further affirmed after I posted a question box on Instagram asking, and I got a message saying that this person had found my blog googling reviews of Normal People, which blew me away because that book is anything but niche. It was extra sweet to think that a book that's played such a major role in the course of my life has also connected me with people who actively keep up with my blog. I guess this makes sense because my essay about realizing I loved Sally Rooney books after all and my listicle matching phases of life with which of her books you should start with are two of my most popular posts. 

I have a tendency to shrug off the success or downplay the reach of the site or the work that I do because it started as a teenage hobby. The name sounds kid-y cause I was a kid when I named it! This bothers me sometimes, and it's taken a lot of real adults that I professionally trust to imbue a sense of actual pride in all this work I've done—the 852 posts that I've collected over the years. In a lot of ways, it wasn't the professionalized aspects like ARCs and working with authors and publicists and having real obligations that kept me here even as I went through reading slumps or fell out of love with books almost entirely in the awkward phase between YA and literary fiction. It was understanding that RWM is kind of a monument to my teenage self and the impenetrable force she was. She went through a lot and did not have an easy go, but she had time, a computer, and a sheer force of determination that ultimately built a cocoon of an internet world that she could live inside of. She built this, not me. I'm just a dedicated steward to the house she built. Her willingness to scream opinions she wasn't really qualified to have into the void until she'd finally done it long enough that her opinions were at least a little qualified. To ask authors if they'd have a chat for the blog, leveraging being a teenager talking about YA books online to gain access to people she found to be incredibly cool. Not only did she learn about social media and promotion and interviewing skills and many basic tenants of journalism, it also taught her how to write. So I've kept it going all these years to prop up this vision that she had when she purchased a domain name for $15 so that the blog would look serious and professional. I can honestly say that even though I haven't made a dime—beyond the free books—I have treated it like a job since day one. 

In addition to that self-seriousness, those 852 blog posts chart the evolution of my personhood. Both evolving tastes and ideas and preoccupations but also quite literally growing up. I became a person over the course of writing this blog. And there's a map of that running through here. Books I didn't understand the first time I read them that I became obsessed with years later, the reviews both living alongside each other here. This blog, and maybe part of why I don't bring it up IRL much, is incredibly exposing. I've always said that reviews say far more about the critic than they do about the book or movie or song or the artist that created them, at least the way I write reviews. One of my writing professors, Eoin McNamee, always says that for a story to work, there needs to be blood on the floor. I think that's true of reviews. Your blood. Even if it's not immediately obvious on the surface. It's an incredibly exposing act, and I guess I've always found a comfort in speaking to the internet void. I'm fairly raw offline, too, but there's a safety in doing it here that I've built up over the last nine years of trusting you all will give me the space to work things out. Yes, it's a book review site, but it's also an augmented version of my diary. 

Sarah told me that I should have a real celebration next year for the tenth anniversary. I think I'll throw a party, actually. But this year, I wanted to mark the occasion too, and I woke up yesterday with a serious itch to give the place a facelift. I never loved the template I've used for the last six years when I last redid the blog with the singular goal of making it feel more "grown-up" in my transition from reading YA to adult. I've realized that since I've found my point of view, voice, and life force in books once again, I wanted a look and feel for the site that reflected that new tone. If you've followed me on Substack or know me offline, you'll know just how much I believe in fashion and the importance of reflecting the inside outwards through visual cues. Within the constricting tools of Blogger, I sat down and gave it a facelift and also updated the static pages at the top that were embarrassingly out of date. My mom, who complained when I got rid of the original hot pink design, will be happy to hear the pink is back, though more subdued this time. I think nine years in, the blog is once again settling into a heyday of clarity of vision and enthusiasm and self-assuredness that it last had when I was deeply in the thick of the YA world. It's nice to finally feel both at home again among books and genuinely so excited about the landscape and what's to come. There were a lot of years where I just wanted to keep the blog going, limping along. I'm ready to be able to honor it thriving while also getting new opportunities in writing, in placing articles, and even in getting to take my book criticism to even more official channels (more on that soon). But RWM will always be home. And I'm so excited about what's to come as I've majorly started pushing myself to level up and match my teenage self's energy in the time I put into reviews, the asks that I make in landing interviews and cool opportunities for the site, and really making the most of it.

I'm always going to be grateful for this and for every single one of you who reads the blog, and particularly for those of you who read these personal posts. You're the real ones. 

I'm going to wrap up this post with a question from Instagram where @netflixandbookreviews asked "What's the best way you've gotten out of a reading slump?"

What an apt question for nine years of book blogging where reading is definitionally your job and therefore slumps are deeply unwelcome. 

I've come to realize that, at least for me, reading slumps and writers block are very similar things. I heard Caoilinn Hughes (author of one of my favorite books, The Alternatives) say on the Stinging Fly podcast that writers block is just a signal that you've made a wrong turn somewhere. You have to listen to your intuition, find the problem, and solve it in order to progress. 

How does this apply to reading? I think I often fall into a slump when I've read an incredible novel and the next one just doesn't quite live up to it. Or I'm in a really chaotic headspace and I'm struggling to focus on anything. For the first problem, a slump tends to come on when I'm reading a book that's just okay. It's not so glaringly bad that I've DNF'd it already. There's nothing overtly wrong. It's just not inspiring me to pick it up or make time for reading. While not every book will be a 5 star read, I do want every book I give my time to to make me excited when I get the chance to read it. Indifference is almost worse than straight up hating the book. So DNF it. DNF relentlessly until you find your way into a book you don't want to put down. You'll get there eventually. 

If it's more you than the books, it's okay to give yourself an intentional reading break. Listen to music, watch TV, put on a podcast. Do other things that don't require such a singular focus. Sometimes, you're just not there. When I stop forcing it, I start feeling a fondness towards reading and drift back it to myself. Another good way to toe back in is putting on an audiobook while you do chores. It allows you to keep reading, but changing format can sometimes unlock something new.