Updating My Review Archive [10th Blogiversary Celebration]

Posted 16 March 2024 in thoughts /4 Comments

Banner reads "Updating my review archive: it's not that exciting but I did it and now I'm going to tell you about it"

Welcome to my first post commerating 10 years of book blogging! You’ll see a few of these posts throughout 2024. I’m taking this blogiversary as an opportunity to reflect on a variety of aspects of my blogging history and present.

Updating the List

The topic of this post was coincidental to my blogiversary. I thought, “I should really update my review archive”, and then I thought, “If I update my review archive, that’s nice that it coincides with 10 years of blogging”. I hadn’t maintained my archive since 2018.

I designed the archive primarily for my own benefit… my theory is that the only time someone looks at my review archive is to 1) get a sense of what type of books I review or 2) find out if I’ve reviewed a specific title.

Previously, I simply split my archive into fiction and non-fiction. Maybe. I don’t even remember at this point, haha. Now I’ve split it into the eight categories listed below. I kept ‘Archived reviews’ (ie reviews I wrote before deciding to become a book blogger, so they have a different tone/approach) as a separate ninth category. These categories may not be a perfect decision. For example, if you want to find all my reviews of books by Catherynne M. Valente, you’d have to look in several categories. But I think if anyone is that keen, they can do a search in page with CTRL + F. 😉 Anyway, here are the categories. Links will take you directly to that section on my Reviews page.

Alongside each listed review is the date the review was published. I left a few reviews out of the list. You’ll still be able to find the posts on my blog, but I didn’t see a need to highlight those titles. Mostly that’s for books where my review was exceptionally short or basic, or the book was by an author who has since exposed herself as a nasty TERF…

So, How Many Reviews Have I Published in 10 Years?

I have published 336 reviews. Here is the breakdown by category:

  • 89 Middle Grade Speculative Fiction
  • 75 Adult Fiction
  • 55 Middle Grade Realistic Fiction
  • 41 Young Adult Fiction
  • 41 Non-fiction – Other Topics
  • 22 Tolkien
  • 8 Non-fiction – Arctic / Northern
  • 5 Non-fiction – Lifestyle / Self-help
  • (plus 116 archived reviews from 2010 to 2013)

Working on this review archive project has had me considering my reviews from all sorts of angles. Perhaps I’ll write more in the future…

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