Book Chase Turns Four Today

Book Chase is officially four years old today and I'm still thoroughly enjoying the experience.  I started the site as an electronic book journal of my own, a way to help me keep track of what I read over the years and what my thoughts are on the books.  Thankfully, it has turned into a lot more than just my personal book journal.

A blog like this one is mostly about "community."  It is a way for like-minded people to chat about one of their greatest lifelong passions: books, authors, and the reading experience, in general.  Most of us don't have many of those conversations in "real life" (especially, the guys here will vouch for that), unless we happen to work around books in some capacity.  Really passionate readers are harder to find than most people imagine.  We are probably outnumbered at better than 100 to 1 by nonreaders.  So something like this, and the dozens and dozens of other book blogs out there, can be great fun - but only because so many are willing to jump in with their own contributions to the overall conversation.  I've been blessed here by regular visits from a whole bunch of people who make Book Chase a place that feels like home to me.  I never know what I'm going to find when I start reading the comments; some of them have been classic, good and bad, but always fun to read.

During the past four years, I have posted just under 1500 individual posts here and have received several thousand comments in response.  I have read 558 books during those years and have reviewed all but three of them right here - and those three are coming soon.  Astoundingly (to me), I can look at the list of all those books and recall a pretty fair amount of detail about each and every one of them.  There's just something about taking the time to reflect on what I read, and organizing my thoughts into a few hundred semi-coherent words, that burns the books deeper into my brain than ever happened before the advent of Book Chase.

As a way to thank everyone for hanging with me here (and through this post, especially), I want to give my copy of Louise Penny's audio book, Bury Your Dead to some lucky commenter.  Click here for my December 8 review of the book.    


To enter the contest, just make sure to comment below, including your choice of any number between 1 and 25.  Be sure to read the comments that precede yours so that you don't choose an already-taken number.  In a week or so, I'll use my random number generator to choose the winner.  It's that simple.

This is a really good mystery/police procedural.  Take a shot at it if you like that kind of thing, or audio books, in general.  This one is a 10-disc set and runs about 12 hours.