Sometimes I get hit with nostalgia for the old days of book blogging. You know back in the day, like when I went to my first BEA (when it was in LA) and people were like, “what’s a blog?” Or the ARC Junkies group on LibraryThing which sprung out of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Group Thread, “Other Places to Get Arcs” which is where I met most of my oldest and dearly beloved book blogging friends who I sometimes feel like I barely talk to anymore. Or how about the time when like EVERYONE reviewed Matrimony and we wondered if anyone would enter our giveaways.

Or my very first readathon, when I could actually visit all the participants and I actually did the whole 24 hours and only read 5 books and most of them were terrible but I didn’t care and I updated my blog a million times because I didn’t care about spamming my subscribers and I did the challenges and drank gallons of diet mountain dew and Dewey was still with us and posted pictures of her cat and then she actually posted pictures of herself.

Or the excitement I felt like when Nymeth first commented on my blog because she was and always will be the ultimate rock star of book blogging to me…not because she organizes tons of events or gets the hottest arcs or has seventy billion followers, but because she is just so awesome and writes the most beautiful reviews and challenges my assumptions again and again, and I would be surprised if there’s anyone who doesn’t love her.

I kind of miss the days when people gave away their used books and it was a big deal and when we first got on twitter and there were just a few of us chatting back and forth and we turned Twitter into one big chat room. I feel like even that rarely happens anymore.

It’s not that things are bad now, they’re not. It’s exciting really and amazing how huge book blogging has become and how I am drowning in books and pitches and bookish talk, but I miss that feeling of intimacy and newness that accompanied the starting out. 

Does anyone else ever feel this way?