A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews Turns 10!

This month marks ten years since this blog was born. Incidentally this month also marks ten years that I've been editing the library's website since one lead to the other. To celebrate this milestone, readers can look forward to some special programming all month long in addition to the usual weekly reviews. The celebration will culminate in a huge surprise that will roll out towards the end of the month.

While I don't remember too many details about what lead to the blog, I do remember it sprang from a brainstorming session between the director and I. At the time I was working evenings at the library, and when I suggested starting a library blog to review books, the director let me run with it. I brainstormed blog titles that night, and "A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews," a play on the middle grade book series title A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, was by far the best one. This blog was almost called "The Lovely Reviews" or "The Lovely Books" (both plays on The Lovely Bones) or "The Lady of the Reviews" (a play on The Lord of the Rings).

This blog adventure has largely been undertaken by flying by the seat of my pants. The first blog post, a welcome message, went live September 6, 2007, and it wasn't until the following week when the first review was posted. It was a review of a children's picturebook, and the reviewer was Miss Kathy. I reviewed a book called Words Are Categorical, and that review was posted later the same day. The first adult fiction title review, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, was not posted until the second week of October. In other words, I just jumped in without a plan or a strategy, and that has (mostly) worked these past ten years.

As the primary reviewer for this blog, it's often a tight schedule to post weekly content. I'd love to post reviews multiple times a week, but this isn't feasible with just one main writer. However, I am reviewing more titles than I did when I first started writing this blog. In the beginning I didn't review every book I read. However, at some point over the past decade I started writing reviews for every book I read, and I also review the occasional movie, mini-series, or TV series.

There was a period around 2011-2013 during which the blog was mostly dormant. At the time my family was grieving the loss of my grandparents (within the space of a couple years we lost both my maternal grandparents), and I was not reading books. I just didn't feel like reading books, and books just didn't hold my attention. When I finally came back to reading, I found that my reading interests had shifted from the usual crime/thriller/mysteries to more lighter genres. Many of the series I followed and read for years, I stopped reading, and I have yet to return to most of them. Then in 2015 I started an online, full time graduate program in information and library science during which I didn't have a lot of time for reading anything other than schoolwork. However, I graduated this spring from that program, and now finally, there is more time for what's important in life: reading what I want to read when I want to read it!

Throughout this month we'll look back on the blog over the years, take a look at some numbers, rustle up a special surprise, celebrate the past decade in "A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews," and toast the next decade of reviews! I hope you'll check back to see what we've got going throughout the month. And I hope I'll hear from readers in the comments too. I'd love to hear how you found the blog, what you enjoy most about the blog, how long you've been reading with us, or anything else you want to share
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--Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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