"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" told Virginia Woolf the women students of Cambridge in 1928 and continued explaining that this leaves the true nature of both woman and fiction unsolved. I am an expert neither on the nature of women nor that of fiction, but I am sure we all agree that lodgings and some money help on great many things. Virginia Woolf is my favorite author. She stands there on the highest step of the podium surrounded with the other favorites Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath and Jeanette Winterson, the latter in my opinion truly the modern equivalent of Woolf. But Virginia stands alone, above all others. She is my literary heroine. Beauty of her sentences intoxicates. When I started to think about a name for the book blog I planned to start, the name simply had to have some connection to Woolf. Thus "A Book Blog of One's Own".
I came to blogging through food blogs, which is in fact kind of strange, as it was not so long ago that I thought I was a terrible cook, whereas I have always been quite an avid reader. I learned to read when I was five years old and have not stopped since. As a child I would read anything, phonebooks and encyclopedias being right there with Disney comics, Nancy Drew and the Famous Five! The first book I ever read twice was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, as my parents had two different editions in their bookshelf and I was curious to see whether the text really was the same in both books. It was.
After high school I got into university to study history. After the first year I applied for a summer job in the local library. To earn some extra money for my dance hobby I continued working as an extra help in the library even after that first summer. I thoroughly enjoyed working there and after a couple of years applied for and was accepted into another university to study information science in order to become a librarian. I got my first job as a librarian straight after I graduated from the university. It was in the same library where I first worked as summer help. Since 2008 I have worked as head of adults' department in Helsinki City Library's main library. I love my job. I guess, I am a librarian through and through!
At work I lead two separate reading groups and will start a third one in the autumn. Through the reading groups I have learned how rewarding it is to share what you have read with others. We are all individuals. Different people read same books differently. And that is what makes talking about books so interesting. Depending on many things, our background, experience or simply our mood at a given time reflects on our reading experience. I love Virginia Woolf's texts, you might hate them or think they are boring, for example, and we are both right! There are no wrong answers when talking about books.
"A Book Blog of One's Own" is not going to be a place for theoretical academic discussions on authors and their work. If that is what you are looking for then I would encourage you to look some place else. I would love you to stay, though. "A Book Blog of One's Own" is going to be a place for very down-to-earth, totally subjective opinions of yours truly on various books I have enjoyed reading. I have met many persons who have said to me that they just finished reading this or that book and truth to be told they did not like the book at all, but they have this policy never to quit reading a book until they have finished it. I honour their principles, but I have no qualms to toss aside a book I don't like. There are too many good, interesting books in the world and more are being written every day for me to waste time on books that don't interest me. Thus, I will only write about books I like in this blog. If through my musings I am able to help some of you to find something interesting to read, maybe a book you might not have thought to read otherwise, I will be truly, blissfully happy! :)
And when here, please leave a comment. I like comments. Comments are good. Comments are nice. In fact comments are highly appriciated. To rephrase, very brutally I must admit, my other favorite author Jane Austen, a book blogger with a new blog is very much in need of comments. Okay, that sounded awful. Miss Austen said it so much better. I am no Jane, but let's get the show going non the less. Stay tuned for Chapter 1.
