Back in the day, aka 12 YEARS AGO (???)

For those of you who are new to my blog, or the book blogging community, Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, originating over at the Broke and the Bookish, and is exactly what its title hints at. Each week we're given a topic to explore in our entries.

To be real, it doesn't seem real that I've been blogging about books for going on twelve years. 

Well, WAIT, it actually has been twelve years this month. It may have even past by now. I was just getting into the swing of things when Johnny Depp was in my hometown filming a movie (which was a huge deal to a small city, naturally) and I feel like it's probably getting pretty close to that time of year? 

That is nuts to me. 

Anyways. In these twelve years, I've read and reviewed A LOT. A lot being nearly 800 books. Some of which were bought, some of which were sent. When I look back at some of the original reviews of mine, I get a bit flinchy and twitchy--my reviews are not great now but they were so much worse then and not just because Booked J started on MySpace. 

The good news is, I am not going to share those reviews with you. Because, ah, yikes. But, I can share the books in question because I think of them often. And, in truth, I still have most of them with me. 

My books are some of the few possessions that mean something to me and I will always have a soft spot for them. As long as I can have them with me, I'm going to. These ten titles are split up into two categories, the first seven books were sent to me, and the other three were books I reviewed because they were what I was reading on my own. 

None of them are in any particular order!

 

The Debutante by Kathryn Williams | The Lost Summer by Kathryn Williams 

 

Almost Home by Jessica Blank | Stray by Stacey Goldblatt 

 

 The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance & The Day I Killed James by Catherine Ryan Hyde