The brief history of this blog & why it was started :-)

Hello all! I don’t feel like doing a book review today, but I did want to post something.
So, I thought, maybe I should tell you how I got the idea for this blog and why I started it.
Of course, you may also wonder, and rightly so, why I haven’t talked about this before. :-)
After all, it would be a logical first post. Anyway, despite the delay, I shall now give you a brief history (okay, maybe not so brief) about this blog, and myself. First, I must back up a couple of months…

In June, a new family started coming to our church, I began talking with the lady/mom/wife, or however you want to describe her. We exchanged emails and shortly after that she sent me one. At the end of her email was her blog address. Curious, I checked it out, and was intrigued. I knew a little bit about blogs before this, but to my recollection, I had never looked at any. So over the course of the summer I occasionally checked out her blog and she tried to persuade me to start one. :-)
(you can check her blog out here: http://dea-frommyhearttoyours.blogspot.com/)
I thought a blog sounded interesting, but way too time consuming, and I had absolutely no idea what I would talk about. (Unless it was a family blog and I gave updates on my family) So, I continued on with my daily routine throughout the summer.

Then in August, our church had a weekend youth/teen/singles/whatever, camp out/retreat. During this retreat we watched the dvd series of the Harris brothers entitled “Do Hard Things.” (This was the purpose of the retreat) If you are familiar with their story, you know that their blog basically started their ministry. Anyway, so that is the second part of the story.

Shortly after this retreat, a friend of my brothers and fellow church member also started his own blog. Which I also enjoy looking at, you can find his blog at the sidebar or follow this link:
http://thereformeddoug.blogspot.com/

Anyway, so all these people have blogs! I still think they are interesting, but after all, what on earth would I talk about, and who on earth would care what I have to say! :-)

However, at the end of August, I had two separate conversations with people about a book I was reading, I went into some detail about it etc. After these conversations I thought, “Hmm, I love to read, and I’ve read a variety of things, and I love talking about books, why not have a blog about books!” So with this thought in mind, I began making some quick, and impulsive decisions. I was going to start a blog, and it would be about books! I remembered the word bibliophile (my sister helped me discover this word when I was doing a college project) and thought it’d be the perfect name.

However, even though the primary purpose of my blog was to be about books, I wanted to give myself some leeway to talk about music, movies, or my family if I ever wanted to expand. Thus, the “and more” was added to the title.

So, that is a rather lengthy version of how I got started on this blog.

Now, moving on a little further. One of my reasons for starting the blog, was primarily to encourage others to read good books. You may notice that I have a lot of “Classic Christian” kind of literature up that I review. This is not all that I read, I do in fact enjoy Christian historical romance fiction. However, I don’t really want to encourage others to read that, I’d rather you read more “quality” books. That’s why you won’t be finding any reviews with those types of books. So, lest you think I am some perfect person who only reads “old-fashioned” books, it’s not true.

In fact in the course of the months of September and October I have so far, read approximately 32 books, and only 7, soon to be 8 of those books have made it to my blog for reviews. However, at the same time, I really do enjoy the “old fashioned” books, and think they are much more worthwhile than contemporary fiction.

Anyway, I say that to let you know that I enjoy a variety of books. One day, I may incorporate more “classic” literature as well for review. (i.e. Jane Austen, maybe Charles Dickens, or other such authors)

More reasons/purposes/trivia about the blog: I am generally assuming that the majority of my readers are on the “younger side” (with the exceptions of my “adult” friends from church and family members). This may be a little presumptuous of me, but that’s just my guess. I define “younger” as in teens to young adults/twenties, etc. As a result, my writing style is a little more directed to that age range, at least, I guess it is…maybe not. :-)

However, I also would like the blog to be useful to adults/parents as well. I hope it to be helpful in parents choosing books for their kids. I also would like the blog to be a place where interesting discussions about the books can happen. This hasn’t really happened yet, but hopefully in the future, readers will get a little more involved.

Anyway, hmm, I can’t quite decide if I should drag this out a little further and talk about my personal background with reading etc. Maybe I will do that tomorrow! :-)

So, I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about how this blog got started. Although the blog is time consuming and I am swamped with reading, I am enjoying it immensely!

Have a wonderful day!