It’s so fun to be at the one-year point of this blog and look back. Justine and I cherish this blog because it really is a representation of things that are so precious to us: books and things that are inspired from them. Although the giveaways we’re doing to celebrate (here and here) are so fun and the participation from our readers with them is awesome, it wouldn’t be a true celebration if we didn’t look back at some of our favorite content that’s helped to connect us with readers from all over.
My favorite posts from the past year are:
Original Short Story Feature by Cassidy Liston
This post was written by my sister-in-law Cassidy Liston, who is mega talented. She actually moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of writing and acting (and has her own IMDB page what what??) and is doing so well there. This post was part of our October’s Month of the Macabre (which was Justine’s idea, by the way, and was so fun!) and when I shared it to my Facebook page seriously all of our friend’s and family were so impressed by Cassidy’s talent. And, I think it’s one of the only times we’ve ever had original creative content (i.e. an original story, not a review) on the blog before, so that makes this one stand out.
Story-Inspired Experience: Cubano Espressos at Liberty Market
First of all, look at my dark hair! I’m very blond now so I guess another thing about looking down memory lane at our older posts is the appearance changes!
This post was inspired by Hourglass by Myra McEntire, one of my most favorite YA books. In the book the main character loves Cubano espressos and so Justine and I decided to go to our favorite restaurant/espresso bar and make a fun night of it. The espressos were delicious (a little strong because there’s only a little sugar and no cream, if you like it creamy try a Cortado!) and it was fun to feel like Emerson for a night!
Story-Inspired Experience posts are my favorite and I wish we had more of them. In fact, just like how people have New Year’s Resolutions my New Blog Year’s resolution is to try to have more of these posts in the next year!
Review: Beyond Parallel by Matthew Turner
This is one of my favorite reviews I’ve written. Matthew Turner is an independently published author who knows how to write and knows how to promote, and to be successful with self-publishing you have to have both. The reason I loved this review is because everything about it was easy: the book was easy to love, the review was easy to write, and it was easy to put together because he had a professional press package ready for me.
And, when I read this quote, even still for the bazillionth time I get a little chill:
Matthew Turner is going to be starting a Kickstarter to fund the print edition of this book, so stay tuned because we’ll be spreading the word.
Stories Behind Our Pictures
I don’t even really know why, but I absolutely loved writing this post. Our Instagram account is one of my favorites parts of blogging; I love sharing quotes, covers, and anything else that inspires me while I’m reading. However, for how great and fun Instagram is, it’s not exactly a great blogging platform so it was fun to write a post with a little more backstory on our recent pictures:
Bookstore in Miami, Arizona
Video Review: Just One Day by Gayle Forman
You’d think that because Justine and I write this book blog together that we both read the same books, but this is hardly the case. I’d say that out of all the books we both read there’s only about a 10% cross-over. Some of this is intentional (we like different types of books) and sometimes it’s because we want to feature several different types and genres of content here and so we have to read different books to make that happen.
Even with this said though, I love it when we can and do read the same book at the same time. This is what happened with Just One Day by Gayle Forman. We both loved her If I Stay series and drove two hours to Tucson to meet her at the Tucson Festival of Books.
We realized while reading the book that doing a video review was absolutely necessary. There was no way that we could both describe it written word the different things it meant to us. Even though Justine and I are best friends we didn’t meet until we were in our twenties so we had very different experiences and therefore read books through different lenses. I loved doing this video review because we both got to talk together about the different ways this book spoke to us:
Well thanks for reading about my favorite posts are from the last year, I can’t wait to see what we come up with for this next year!