Re-Readathon #5: February 5th - 12th

It's a new year and thus time for another Re-Readathon! Those of you who took part last time will know that I was ill and thus the event sort of fell apart. To stop that from happening again I'm so excited to announce that I now have two co-hosts for the event, so please give your loudest cheers for long time Re-Readathon supporters, Katie and Gemma!

The rules for Re-Readathon are simple: during the week it's on, read a book you've already read. This can be a book you've read once or seventeen times, you can dedicate the week solely to re-reading or just pick up an old favourite alongside your other books, it's entirely up to you. We just love it as a week out of any reading obligations, spending time with old friends. 

During the week we'll be running mini challenges and also possibly giveaways and we really encourage the social aspect of the event, so please go and visit other participants and say hi! You can use #rereadathon on social media to easily find each other. 

If you'd like to take part please blog, vlog, Instagram or tweet about your intentions (with a link back to this post please!) and link it up below. For your convenience, we have an easy tweet you can send already written for you, just click the link below. 

What'll be on your TBR? 

London Bookshop Crawl #2

London Bookshop Crawl is happening again and its popularity has exploded, as mentioned in my previous post. Because of this there seems to be some confusion about details for the day and this would appear to be the easiest way to clear those up!

Last year, on the first London Bookshop Crawl, there were less than 30 of us and we went around a route created by myself and chatted and had a lovely day. This year the intention is to do the same, but because of the interest we've had it's going to have to work a little differently.

I pretty much organise this event on my own, but thanks to help from some lovely past crawlers we are running four groups this year, each of a similar size to last year (so 25-30 per group), because it's very important to me that people have the chance to connect with each other and meet new book lovers without the day becoming totally overwhelming. I know some people deal well with huge groups but I don't and I know a lot of others don't either, so the groups are staying small, for this year at least. Small groups are also essential for some of the smaller bookshops that we'll be visiting on the day, as large numbers would overwhelm them. These four groups will be visiting 7 bookshops over the course of the day - the bookshops are pretty much the same for each group but the itinerary is different, allowing us to stagger the arrival of groups at smaller shops and helping them to deal with the crazed book lovers descending on them! People who sent a message asking to be in the guided groups before the spaces were gone have been allocated a group and we'll be sending more information to them this week.

However because we didn't want anyone to miss out on the day, we have extended the crawl throughout Greater London and are putting together a huge list of bookshops who'll be taking part and providing special offers and discounts for bookshop crawlers. We'll be circulating this list along with some suggested routes and a printable bookshop crawl ID card to everyone who has a free ticket via Eventbrite so anyone who wants to will be able to take part on the day. We'd also love everyone to use #LondonBookshopCrawl to share where they go and what they buy and even to meet up with other crawlers if that's something they're interested in doing.

The only difference between being in a guided group and doing the tour alone is that people in guided groups will be following a set itinerary and meeting a few new people, but as of writing this post there are 400+ people with Eventbrite tickets who aren't in guided groups, so I'd say the chances of you stumbling across another bookshop crawler during the day are quite high!

It's basically going to be a huge celebration of the excellence of bookish people and bookshops and we hope you'll join us, whether or not you got a place in a guided group (which, to be honest, are just a group of people walking around visiting bookshops anyway!).

Six.

A few days ago my blog turned six. I KNEW I would forget so I mentioned it on twitter several days beforehand, but I thought I should write something here (especially since I've been so awol recently!) to mark the occasion because the fact is that blogging has pretty much changed my life.

I could talk about all the books I've read since I started, and I will if you give me long enough, but really for me blogging has been the gateway to things and people and experiences and even a business. Here are some things that have come from six years of blogging:

• Friends of the most wonderful (and offensive. Hi, Laura!) kind. They are not just blogging friends, they are real friends friends, especially the two other Southerners, and they enable me to buy books and eat cake and shout rude words in the children's section of bookshops and sing songs from Les Mis loudly outside Queen's theatre. One of them can walk around for hours in the most ridiculous (and beautiful) shoes, and one sends me secret santa parcels that make me cry and talks to me about minimalism and another I'm just looking forward to getting to know better. And one of them is from all the way over in America and has actually come and stayed in my house and I LET HER GO TO FOYLES ALONE BECAUSE I'M A TERRIBLE FRIEND (and then her luggage weighed so much she couldn't carry it anymore). These are people I would have never met without the wonderful world of book blogging and I am extremely grateful for them. 
• Ninja Book Swap. Although I've recently had to close it to new participants I love the swap so much. It was the first time I ventured into a joint project with a person I (at the time) had never met before and Hanna and I had a lot of fun running it together. I'm excited to keep running it with the group of swappers I already know and trust, and I've met so many fantastic people through it as well as acquiring so many amazing books and sending many many copies of The Night Circus to people...

• London Bookshop Crawl - in case you're not aware, this is pretty much the reason I've been missing from the blog for a while. Last year I decided it would be cool to get random bookish strangers from the internet to come book shopping with me and lo and behold we had an amazing day going round lots of different bookshops and I got to meet some Ninja swappers face to face and made a lot of excellent new friends. It was always going to be an annual thing and we all thought it would be bigger this year, but this year I decided to put the event on Facebook and currently we're running three groups for the day and have literally 300 others taking part on their own. There are bookshops all over London joining in and it's totally insane, but very very wonderful and I'm terrified and excited and hoping it's going to be just as amazing as last year's was. (If you want to join the madness the Facebook event is here). If it hadn't been for my experience with Ninja Swap and with meeting Laura, Katie, Hanna, Ellie and Charlotte in real life I never would have had the guts to start this, so thanks blogging!

• Ninja Book Box. This is the most recent of my bookish projects, but blogging has made me so much more aware of publishers in general and there's no way I ever would have had the thought of starting up a subscription box of any kind without seeing all the other wonderful ones there are out there and realising that there isn't one that did exactly what I wanted - gives you books from all genres published by independent publishers along with gifts that are beautiful as well as being actually useful. Without blogging and all the previously mentioned confidence boosting projects I would have never had the guts to launch a Kickstarter which was really successful due to phenomenal support mostly from online friends, and now here I am with a business and once again thanks blogging!

So yes. Six years ago I'd just moved across the country with my fiance and was living in a teeny tiny flat with a teeny tiny shower and terrible windows on the high street with VERY LOUD buses going past constantly and now I'm married with two kids and a lovely house with a garden and all sorts of bookish shenanigans going on. It's pretty miraculous really, thanks for being here for it. 

#Discworldathon: In the Beginning...

Welcome to Discworldathon, a year of celebrating all things Discworld. If you're new to the series, this month is designed to help you work out where might be best for you to start. If you're not new to the series, feel free to weigh in in the comments with where you started/where you'd advise newcomers to start!

This is the Discworld Reading Order produced by Epic Reads and it's a handy, colour coded way to decide which order to read the books in. Each colour represents a character or theme - just pick a colour and follow it. Easy, right? 

But what if you know nothing about Discworld? Well, either you can find someone who knows you well who's already a fan and can give you an idea about which characters might be most 'you', or you check out my little guide below! 

If you've ever mentioned your desire to read Discworld to anyone it's quite likely they've told you not to start with The Colour of Magic. Although it's the first book in the series even Terry Pratchett didn't think it was the best. Honestly Wyrd Sisters, our readalong book for January is probably as good a place as any to begin, although it's technically the second book in the Witches 'series', but the writing is hilarious and the story is gripping. If you're still baffled, here's a little synopsis of the characters...

Wizards - you'll get a better introduction to them when Louise hosts next month but they're basically a bunch of ageing, slighly bumbling magic men who think they know a lot more than they actually know about the world. They also have some strange ideas about...well, most things, and have a librarian who is an orangutan. 

Witches - the antithesis of the wizards. A (smaller) group of women (not) lead (they don't believe in leaders) by Granny Weatherwax who believes in 'headology' and has no idea what the theatre is. The witches are the ones who actually get things done in the Discworld. 

Tiffany Aching - some of the witches (notably Granny Weatherwax) also feature in the Tiffany Aching books, but these are the ones I recommend most often to people starting out. Tiffany has help in her  world-saving endeavours from the Nac Mac Feegle, a group of vicious, hard-drinking pixies...

Death - Death is brilliant, and this is probably one of the only times you'll hear that said. A big skeleton with piercing blue eyes riding a horse named Binky, he's constantly struggling to understand mortals and has the occasional midlife (mid death?) crisis...

City Watch - These are my favourite books. Commander Sam Vimes sort of accidentally becomes in charge of turning the Night Watch from a shambles of inept, bumbling men into a cohesive system of law enforcement. He's pretty put-upon and has to deal with all sorts of idiocy and prejudice along the way. 

There are lots of other stand alone type books, and the Moist von Lipwig books which also (in the above infographic at least) encompass some of the other 'industrial' books, but hopefully this little intro gives you some kind of ideas about where you might want to start. 

Those who are familiar with the series already feel free to weigh in in the comments or over in the Goodreads group!