About This Blog

About this blog

Why did I start this blog?

For more than a year, I had been without a regular book group. When I moved from the mountains of North Carolina to the Piedmont, I landed in a pleasant community populated by many book-lovers. (The success of the independent bookstore, always busy, always a welcoming spot, marks this village as a readers’ delight.) Still, I was a newcomer and didn’t manage to find my way to an ongoing book group for several months.

Without a regular outlet to talk about books, I began to write about them. For years, I’d been a regular book reviewer for a statewide magazine, but this new scribbling was more personal, more episodic. I talked about favorite books in emails and phone calls with friends; I started a list of my top 12 reads of the year to include in my annual Christmas letter. I kept jotting down notes about books, with no particular notion about what to do with them.

I got in the habit of writing succinct (50 words or less) “staff reviews” when I worked briefly at my local bookstore, and I continued to write book reviews for the magazine: Our State: North Carolina. But my yen to discuss what I was reading outstripped the availability of regular outlets.

Then, about a year ago, the eureka moment: a blog about books!

It wasn’t as easy as I thought. I’m a bit of a technophobe. (I sometimes fantasize about a t-shirt that reads: Luddites Do It More Slowly.) My first attempts at what others seem to create easily didn’t gel, and I gave up. But I kept thinking about the blog and kept jotting down mini-reviews, for my eyes only.

Finally, things seem to come together. I recruited a talented blogger to help design a simple blog site. My backlist of reviews and book-related meanderings kept growing. I cast off some activities that were time-consuming and not as rewarding as they’d been in the past, so I’d have time to attend to the blog.

Finally, I launched this blog in May 2013.

So, what are my hopes for this blog? I plan to post thoughts, musings, mini-reviews, and reprints of published reviews and articles related to books, bookstores, and publishing. I have no commercial aspirations—this blog really is intended for friends who share my passion for reading and writing. I also hope to hear from these friends—and new ones who love books—and I will pass on their comments, assuming approval. Maybe this will end up being a written form of a book group—an interactive discussion.

Oh, and the blog name? After playing around with multiple titles, I decided on exlibrisnc as an homage both to Anne Fadiman’s wonderful little book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, and to my home state, North Carolina, which has a rich literary tradition.