15 Day Book Blogging Challenge, Day 1: My Confessions

Okay, so I'm late boarding this train, but I want to be part of the fun too. I asked on Twitter for buddies, so that I wouldn't be alone in taking this epic journey. Thankfully, bloggers are awesome people, so I quickly found three friends to travel with me through the book blogger challenge: Lili of Lili's Reflections, Mickey of I'm a Book Shark and Jessie of Ageless Pages Reviews, so make sure you check out their responses too! We'll be doing one challenge a week every Friday for fifteen weeks. For more information on the challenge itself, go visit Good Books and Good Wine's explanation post here.

This first week, April has challenged us all to make 15 book-related confessions, so let's get it started, shall we?

1. Ever since college, when I would bribe myself with a pleasure read to get through textbooks, I've almost always been reading at least two books at any given time. In fact, I've almost lost the ability to concentrate on a single book all the way through.
2. I struggle with the impulse to overrate or underrate books, but I'm trying really hard to be better about that, and finally ironing out exactly what my ratings mean to me has been a huge help.
3. When people comment and tell me that I didn't like a three star book, even one whose review is ranty, I feel rage. Just because I liked it overall doesn't mean there weren't drawbacks, but 3 means I can unreservedly say I liked it, so don't tell me I didn't! *bristles*
4. If someone comments on my blog and tells me to come to their blog, you can bet I will never go to that blog, though I probably would have otherwise.
5. Comments that don't say anything specific to my review (as in "great review" or "looking forward to this") do not get comments back or even responses here on my blog. I know commenting is hard, but I work really hard to leave substantive, quality comments. Getting those is better than none, but they don't make me curious about your blog and I literally have nothing to say in response aside from "Thanks!"
6. I am equal parts terrified and excited about the impending move to Wordpress.
7. Rarely do I read over my blog posts before I publish them, because I find reading my own writing to be a form of torture. I'm going to try to be better about this so that I can catch the inevitable typo or three that sneaks in (homonyms are my enemy), but I do this only out of love of you guys. I totally didn't proof read most of my papers either.
8. I am jealous of every single one of you who's read a book I haven't read but want to read. I want to have read EVERYTHING.
9. I am also jealous of everyone who reads more quickly than I do.
10. There are ARCs on my shelves from 2010 that I've not yet read. Oops. To be fair, I was a young library student and not yet a blogger when I got them, but there's no explaining the ones from last BEA other than I fail.
11. It irritates me when people who visit only come to my blog for giveaways win them, so much so that I sometimes toy with not doing giveaways anymore, though I do like the idea of giving back to the publishing industry which has been so kind to me.
12. Sometimes I fear that I spend more time thinking about how to obtain books, searching Goodreads for books to read, and organizing my shelves than actually reading. This may not be true, but...I could definitely get more reading done if I did less of that.
13. Since I started blogging, I've read more books every year than I did the year previously, but not this year, which saddens me. Damn you, book a day challenge, which, by the way, was more books than I could comfortably read with a full time job and modest amount of friends.
14. I own somewhere around 1300 books and want more. Most of them came from Goodwill.
15. It's been somewhere from 3-6 months since I went to book club, because I've always had either family plans or a business trip scheduled on the day of the club (when almost any other day I'm free free free). And I think there was also a month where I just didn't have time.

TA DAAAA! I am done. That was difficult.  But now, suffused with triumph, here's a last and timely one: I feel like I would be better respected as a book blogger if I had a professional design, but I will soon, so yay! Moving up in the world!

So, dear friends, did anything surprise you? Shock you? Make you laugh?