Goodreads User Never Leaves Reviews, Starts Book Blog

An Introduction

Though I have been an active member of Goodreads – the digital book-tracking and recommendation site – for ten years, I’ve yet to leave a single review. I have always been in too much of a hurry to move on to the next book while juggling a few others at the same time to take a moment to collect my thoughts into written words. Encouraged by a co-worker to start a literary blog, I eventually decided to pursue the idea. Will I reform my ways and start leaving more than just star ratings on Goodreads? Probably not. But I would like to spend more time focused on contemplating and writing about the roughly one thousand books I have read in my lifetime. Hence, I have started a blog. I don’t anticipate reviewing individual books, but rather lists of books on a particular subject matter or written by a specific author. One of my favorite aspects of Goodreads is creating categories and organizing my books into them, much like how I arrange my bookshelves at home.

The focus of this blog will be historical fiction and nonfiction, with the occasional venture into mystery and suspense. I find the early twentieth century the most fascinating, but I love world history of any time and place. The more tragic, the better. I find myself drawn to eras of great upheaval – the world wars, the Russian Revolution, Ireland’s many failed rebellions, Japan’s multiple attempts to conquer Asia, etc. Let’s be honest, history is, in large part, utterly miserable. I’m impressed by how people just survived day-to-day life in most time periods. As a life-long learner, I avidly soak up knowledge about world events and cultures through the books I read to gain insight into the human condition and the state of the world today. I read not to escape reality but to appreciate the blessings of my reality when I return to it.

That being said, history need not always be apocalyptic doom and gloom. It may seem an odd choice to name my blog The Nostalic Reader, as nostalgia connotes pleasant, romanticized memories of the past. Nostalgia certainly plays a role in my love for history. There’s something comforting in reading about simpler times before all the distractions of technology that exist today. Books series like Anne of Green Gables, the original Nancy Drew mysteries, and Dear America hold a special place in my heart both because they are set in the past and because they invoke happy memories of my own past reading them as a child.

Despite my love of reading, I watch quite a bit of television. No surprise, I often enjoy watching historical drama series and films, which influence my reading habits. Once I latch onto a particular culture, time period, or historical event, I immerse myself in film and literature to expand my understanding of the subject. Throughout this blog, I will mention the film or TV series that inspired me to read the books I’m reviewing, as they are intertwined in mind.

My intention in writing this blog is to review books by reacting to them rather than providing a play-by-play description. I plan to avoid spoilers as much as possible, as well as books I did not enjoy. Out of a five-star rating system featured on Goodreads, five stars are hard-won by me. A book must be truly impressive in my eyes to earn such an achievement. On the other hand, I have never left a one-star rating. If a book was that awful, I simply did not finish it. When I was younger, I felt obligated to finish every book I started. The older I get, the less I want to devote time to hate-reading. I stopped reading my most recent castoff on page six. I award a mixed bag of three- and four-star ratings to books I enjoy with the occasional two-star rating to those I did not. If I read a book that I dislike and would not recommend, I don’t want to waste my time thinking or writing about it. My pledge is to never discuss two-star books on this blog and offer up mostly books I've rated four and five-stars. Some books I discuss may be highly popular, such as And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (which as I write this has 1,171,028 ratings on Goodreads) whereas others will be eclectic and niche titles such as Letters from Korean History 4: From Late Joseon to the Late Daehan Empire (currently has 1 rating – mine! – on Goodreads).

Happy Reading!