Quite Possibly the Most Personal Post I'll Ever Write

I've been mostly MIA this past year and a half.  I made a renewed commitment to blogging in 2015 and had a great time with it; that year was by far my best reading year.  I finally crossed the three digit read goal (108!).  I read Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Mariller, and discovered that I love Cormoran Strike just as much as Harry Potter.  I hit a great groove on audiobooks and re-read/listened to the first three books in The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer in preparation for Winter's release.  Rebecca Soler is an amazing narrator who brought something new to the experience.

In September of 2015, my Dad underwent an outpatient surgery. Two days after the surgery he was hospitalized for severe pancreatitis. He died December 29, 2015 after 103 days in the hospital.  He was 62.  There were many ups and downs over those three months and while I remember highlights, most of the medical stuff has become pretty fuzzy.  

As I've mention before my job gets incredibly busy during the Christmas season. Work and Dad’s hospitalization didn’t leave much time for blogging.  I fully intended to pick up the blog again in January when things settled down.  I even wrote some 2015 wrap-up posts from the hospital in December; they were easy.  I’d read so many great books in 2015 that I had tons of material. 

I think there were two factors that killed my blogging motivation as I got into 2016.  First - MAJOR book slump.  I wasn’t loving anything.  To be fair I wasn’t HATING anything either – they were all just…fine.  It’s hard to get excited about fine.  Second, I was still processing my Dad’s death and I’m a very private person.  I’m never going to publish an in depth post on those months or how I dealt after the fact.  In 2015, I’d started doing more personal posts related to reading.  In 2016, I wasn’t ready to post anything personal.  I tried a few times, but got stuck after a sentence or two.  Even reviews can get personal.  How I feel about a book is intrinsically tied to my life experiences.  The first book I read in January of 2016 was Me Before You by Jojo Moyes.  There was no way to write a review of that without being personal.

The rest of 2016 didn’t get any better from a “free time/head space for blogging” perspective. 
March: My dog, Gizmo, died suddenly at six and a half. 
May: I decided to fix my house up to get it ready to sell in August. 
July: I broke my foot. 
August: I got a puppy (Boston McDoodle).

I finally got my house on the market in early October (and sold).  My Mom bought a new house in November and I moved in with her.  The original plan for me to stay there for a year to save money, but I like living there, she likes having me and it really makes no sense for us to maintain two separate households for one person each, when we get along well.

Hopefully getting this out there will free some headspace for me to write reviews again.