Welcome to bookends

Hello lovely people of the Interwebz,

So, here I am. It is 2020, and I am starting a blog (are blogs still cool in 2020? I am myself a tragically unhip person, so I don’t actually know…)

Basically, I am starting this blog because a friend of mine suggested it. I think his suggestion came from him being bored of me talking about books at him 98% of the time, and he was hoping that if I put it on the internet, I would text him about books less (ha. How wrong he is. I will still talk about books, endlessly, to everyone who has the patience to pretend to listen to me. To be fair, that isn't that many people.). Well, more fool him, I have now taken him up on his suggestion and so he is legally obliged to at least pretend to read this blog. I will be quizzing him.

And I do love books. I love talking about books. I love recommending books, and it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling when one of my friends added my top-10 2019 books to her Goodreads want-to-read shelf. I love both the act of reading, and books themselves. I adore being transported into new places and new universes, and falling in love and learning to hate new people, and getting to experience emotions and adventures and situations that I haven’t yet, or maybe never will. I like to see how someone completely unrelated to me grapples with scenarios I have grappled with, like painful first love and the mercilessness of homesickness and the loneliness of making new friends, and to discover the paths I didn’t take through those people who might have been my friends had I lived in a different world. I like learning about places I will never go, times I will never know, and people I will never meet through the experiences, knowledge, culture and work of others, and I always feel so grateful that I get to share with these authors the work of love that they have put into the world. And I absolutely adore that I can travel through space and time and people all through the same combinations of 26 letters, and in a piece of paper and cloth and ink. The fact that books exist, and that they have transmitted stories and knowledge to us through the thousands of years of human history, is all the proof I need to believe in magic.

I love stories. I love the medium in which stories are shared. And I love the people who tell stories.

And I love sharing that love. I am not joking when I say that I can talk about books for hours. Reading is how I recharge myself when I am drained, and how I can share pieces of myself with the people who surround me. One of my favorite things to do with the people I love is to just sit quietly on the couch with them while we both read our books. I love listening to people talk about books they have read and liked, and getting recommendations from them as well – it’s the best way of starting a conversation, of getting to know someone better, of sharing something personal and beautiful. Books are great, and I can safely say that my closest relationships today all include very lengthy, very profound discussions of literature, as well as trading recommendations back and forth. I’m the type of person who buys books as every single gift – housewarming, birthdays, Christmas. I had to be talked out of buying a married couple friends of mine a book as their anniversary present.

I used to want to be a writer, but then as I got older I realized I am in fact a talentless hack, so I’m going to talk and write about books instead.

So, people of the internet, I am including you in this love. I’ll post book reviews, recommendations, general musings on all things reading-related – with occasional jaunts into other things I like, like makeup and football and pubs. As I have no idea what I am doing and will be making up this blog thing as I go along, please do comment on what I am doing badly, and what I can do better, what you’d like to see more of or less of, etc. If you also like reading and want to go on some more adventures with me, then yay! I always love company. And if you don’t like reading – well, I’ll do my damndest to help you fall in love with all the worlds that are out there and just waiting for you to discover them.

Happy reading,

Amélie xx