Being B.I.P.

Welcome to Buried in Print! I am, y’know: that is, buried in it. In print. But it’s okay. Don’t worry. Most of my favourite people are beneath the surface as well.

I’ve been making bookish net-friends since 1998 and I’ve had a website since 2003, but I’ve only just decided to take my bookchat public, mainly because there are a couple of blogs that I discovered last year that I have so thoroughly enjoyed that I wanted to stop lurking and start posting.

So with 2010, I’m turning over a new template and reaching out. Gradually I will start to populate these pages with past reading logs and reviews, but there are a lot of blank pages ahead of me yet.

This site will have some conventional reviews, but more often I write about the experience of reading a book. For me that’s a personal experience and can be as much about the place and time of my reading it, or about the particular edition of the book, than it is about the plot and characters. Not that I don’t appreciate a good plot summary (I forget the details two books later if not before), but there are lots of places on the ‘net to check for names and dates; what I most want to remember is how it felt to have read a certain book at a certain time and I am highly spoiler-phobic so I’m often more comfortable making generalizations about my response to a book than recounting the events therein.

So if it matters to you if I used a postcard belonging to a book’s previous owner for a bookmark, if you’ve ever found margin notes almost as interesting as the text, if you’re compelled to re-read certain favourite books when certain seasons roll around, if you sometimes remember the particular shelf you’ve plucked a book from even when you can’t remember the name of the main character: well, then, you might like my kind of bookchat!

Thanks for dropping by and good reading to you!