It’s blogoversary time! While this latest version of The Zen Leaf has only been in place since August 2014, my book blogging goes back to February 15, 2008. I was suffering dreadful jet lag after returning from my visit to Palestine, and I was wide awake in the middle of the night. My friend Marcia had started a blog on Blogger, and while I’d been putting up an occasional blog post on MySpace (ha!) for a couple years, I decided to start blogging in earnest that February. My first post was in the middle of the night on Valentine’s day, and the next day, I put up my first book review. (It was awful, as these things usually are.) I count that first review as my “official” blogoversary. Heh.

Over these nine years, blogging has changed a lot, both in the community and for me personally. I’ve bounced around from blog to blog, platform to platform, subject to subject. Sometimes I spend more time on books, sometimes on writing, sometimes on wellness, sometimes taking long months away from the blog altogether. I’ve watched blog friends come and go, some decisively quitting their blog with a notice, others just kind of trailing away and never returning. I’ve met dozens of fellow bloggers from around the world, and a fair handful of authors as well. I’ve had lovely moments in blogging, and some terrible moments. And I’ve read nearly 1000 books – many of which I never would have known about if not for fellow bloggers – since I began this project nine years ago.

While not always good or easy, these have truly been amazing years. I can’t imagine what my life would be like today if I hadn’t followed a middle-of-the-night, jet-lag-fueled impulse to write that first blog post nine years ago.