Book Blogger Appreciation Week 2016 is hosted by Ana, Andi, Heather, and Jenny at The Estella Society. It’s a week dedicated to celebrating the hard work, dedication, and love we put into book blogging, and to nurturing the connections and sense of community we’ve been so lucky to find through it. Each day of the week has a dedicated theme/blogging topic.
Day 2: Interview Day!
My BBAW interview partner is Christy from A Good Stopping Point. Christy is originally from New England but now lives and works in the DC metro area. She is in her early thirties, and her reading interests range from memoirs to thrillers to literary fiction. Christy has been blogging since November 2009, but her blog was new to me, and I’m glad to have the chance to introduce her to you!
Is there a story behind your blog’s name? How did you choose it?
“Just let me get to a good stopping point” was a refrain often heard in my bookish family growing up, so I thought I’d use that phrase to both allude to reading and also as an aspirational hope that my blog would also be a good place for a reader to stop a while
How regularly do you blog? Do you blog about every book you read? If not, how do you decide which ones to discuss?
I blog about 2 or 3 times a month, though I’ll have some more prolific months every now and then. I blog about most books that I read, and am not averse to mini-reviews to make that happen, but there are usually three or four books every year that I can think of nothing to say so I leave them unremarked except for the rating I give it on Goodreads. They are usually books that I neither hate or love, and just can’t summon much energy about either way.
Keeping in mind that you don’t use ratings in your reviews, what would make a book a “five-star” read for you?
As I look through my five-star reads on Goodreads, what most have in common is that I just felt totally immersed in them while I was reading them, and they often lingered in my thoughts and feelings for a while after finishing them.
Tell me a little about your reading habits. Where and when do you do most of your reading? What book formats do you prefer?
I do most of my reading at home, usually on the weekends when I’m not so tired from work. I read books in physical format and on my Kindle Paperwhite and haven’t settled on a preference, though especially for non-fiction, I have found the look-up option and footnote navigation on the Kindle really handy.
I saw you mention on your blog that you’re in a book club with two of my favorite book bloggers, Teresa and Leslie. How often do you meet, and how do you choose your books? For you, how do the book-blog and book-club experience complement each other?
Teresa and Leslie are awesome. 🙂 We just started meeting last year. Our meeting frequency is kind of somewhere between once a month and once every other month. We all have various kinds of online lists or spreadsheets that we shared with each other. We’ll throw out titles of interest via email until one of combined mutual interest is agreed upon. One time we read a book from the Man Booker longlist because Teresa had taken on the challenge of reading all of them. To answer your last question, I started a book blog because I saw a community that I wanted to be part of. The book-club was an opportunity to bring that community closer to home. It’s been a lot of fun and something I really look forward to.
Some book bloggers prefer to keep to the subject and not get too personal. How do you feel about that? Do you blog much about things that aren’t book-related? (I didn’t want to be pushy with personal questions, but if you’d like to share a little more about your life, who you are and what you do when you’re not reading, this would be the time!)
I have written a few personal posts in the past, mostly trip photos, but I mainly keep it bookish on the blog. Sometimes I’ll write about personal connections to the books in my reviews.
I work full-time and live in an apartment with my cat, whose name is Bean. I am fairly active with my church, and also hang out with my friends and family in the area. That often involves a couple of trips to see concerts at Wolf Trap in the summertime. Recently, I’ve been working on another blog I created which is composed of my great-great grandmother’s late 19th century journal entries but I’m waiting to finish the first year of the journal before making it public.
What question that I didn’t ask would you like to answer?
Can’t think of anything at the moment, but I’ll follow up if I think of something. 🙂
Thanks for answering my questions, Christy! It was great getting to know you, and I look forward to keeping up with your blogging journey.
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Oh yes, I’ve uttered, “Let me get to a good stopping point” many, many times.
And so have I!
It’s the phrase that signals the difficult process of disengaging the mind from a good story. 🙂
Love the name because, yes, getting to a stopping point is all-important. The blog with your great-great-grandmother’s journal sounds fascinating.
Thanks! I’m quite excited to roll out the other blog. I’ll have to tweet it out when I’ve made it public (which should be sometime this month).
I AM SO JEALOUS that you and Teresa and Leslie get to hang out and chat about books. I want to be part of that book club! That sounds wondrous!
Also, I can’t wait for your diary blog to go live. I so enjoyed the extracts you’ve shared in the past.
You would be definitely a guest of honor should you come visit our area! It would be awesome to meet in-person.
Yours and others’ comments on the extracts definitely got me thinking I should put the journal online in some fashion.
Amen to that! “Let me get to a good stopping point” is a thing I’ve said more than a time or two!
One does not just put down a book at any moment. These things must be handled properly.
I can so relate to that – it is something that I use very often – let me get to a good stopping point! It is another thing that in a good book, it is difficult to find one, until the book is over. 😛
That’s very true!
I laughed about ‘good stopping point’ phrase. If my mother had had a quarter for every time I said that to her. LOL
And I’m very interested in your great-grandmother’s journals. How wonderful. Love that.
It’s so hard to tear away from books!
My great-great grandmother wasn’t the most scintillating writer but as a peek into life in her time and place, I find the journal fascinating and think others might too. She lived in a village in western Massachusetts and had nine children (which makes the brevity of the journal entries quite understandable.) The journal runs from 1888 to 1902.
It is so much fun to have a book group with Christy and Leslie! They’re such great people, and we have such a good time together. Turning online connections into in-person ones has been one of the truly unexpected pleasures of blogging.