Liebster Award

I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’ve received my first ever blogger award – The Liebster Award. You know what this calls for…an excited cat picture!

Also, a sincere thank you to Alice of Alice in Readerland for passing the award along. You can get to know her better at her award post here.  And now here are the rules, responsibilities, and fun questions that come with the award:

Now, on to answering the questions that come with the award 🙂

Questions From Alice

1. What post are you most proud of writing? – Probably my review of Hyperion. It’s my most viewed review page and I think I did a pretty good job describing why Hyperion was so awesome. A lot of the time, I finish a great book and feel completely incapable of describing just what made me love it, so I’m happy I was able to do this on justice.
2. Do you just write reviews or do you like to write other pieces as well (stories/poems/articles/etc.)? – Just reviews here. I occasionally do memes, but that’s about it.
3. What is something great that’s happened to you/your blog since you started blogging? – Personally, I’ve moved to Cornell and made a lot of great new friends. Although I do miss my friends at ISU, I think overall the move has been good for me. For my blog, I just passed 100 followers during a very fun blog hop (winner of associated giveaway to be announced later today because I’m silly and forgot about it on Monday!).
4. Who is your favorite character from a book and why? – I found this one very hard to answer, but I think my favorite might be Lestat. He’s a little bit insane, but he doesn’t at all conform to vampire tropes, except perhaps for being dead sexy.
5. Is there anything that’s surprised you about the book blogging world? – Well, initially, people actually reading my blog came as a surprise, especially since I didn’t start the blog trying to get followers. Now I’m still constantly surprised by how nice everyone in the book blogging community is and interacting with people has become by far my favorite part of blogging.
6. What’s one book that you wish you could’ve written and why? – Maybe Rober Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I don’t actually want to write a book ever, but I love and admire this series so much that I can’t help wishing just a little that I could write something like that.
7. Who is your favorite character from a T.V. show and why? – I think that would have to be Veronica Mars. She’s a strong female lead who beats out Buffy as my favorite because you don’t constantly get the idea she was designed for boys to drool over. She’s also a lot funnier 🙂
8. Do you have any pets and what are they? – I have cat named Maggie who I adopted from a shelter and who is great company. When I’m home, she follows me everywhere.
9. Aside from reading, what are your favorite hobbies? – As those of you who read my blog know, photography is definitely up there. Other than that, my biggest hobby is probably playing computer games with friends.
10. Where do you get the majority of your books from (stores/libraries/contests/etc.)? – By far, the majority of my books come from the library. I just don’t see any reason to pay for books when my library has more books I want to read than I can ever possibly get too!
11. What’s the story behind your blog name and why you started blogging? – I started blogging after reading The Happiness Project. Gretchan Rubin starts reading random magazines to learn more about new topics and I thought it would be fun to do the same thing systematically with books. That’s when I decided to try to read one non-fiction book for ever number in the Dewey Decimal system. And so Doing Dewey was born 🙂

And Finally…My Nominees

A small caveat – several of the bloggers I nominate don’t display follower counts. Since I think the bloggers I’m nominating are all wonderful, I could easily believe that 199+ other people would have joined me in following them, but I’m pleading ignorance and only eliminating from the running bloggers who obviously have too many followers to meet the requirements.

Quirky Bookworm – Currently reviewing children’s books, but also does some great historical fiction reviews. I like pretty much all her recommendations and she’s great about interacting with readers.

Dustylizard – The only non-book-review blog on the list, dustylizard is simply hilarious. And she takes amazing pictures too!

A Little Blog of Books and Other Stuff – This is a blog I follow via e-mail and I frequently click through posts to “like” them and realize I’ve done this before…for pretty much every post. The author probably thinks I’m a stalker, but really they just write really good reviews and lots of fun book spine poetry.

The Bibliotherapist – A blog I recently followed, drawn in by well written reviews with a fun, unique review layout. Favorite review segments: “Why it took me so long to read this” and her sometime humorous “Initial Impressions”

Deliberate Reader – Another new follow for me and I think a very new blog, currently doing a fun feature – “31 Days of Great Non-fiction Read”. Awesome.

Now What? Should you choose to accept, the rules of being awarded/awarding the Liebster Award are: 1) Answer the 11 questions from the person who nominated you (below). 2) Think up 11 questions of your own. 3) Choose 5 fantastic bloggers (each with less than 200 followers) to answer your questions and present the Liebster Award to. Don’t forget to thank/mention who nominated you! 4) Comment on their blogs to make sure they know they’ve been awarded.

And My 11 Questions for Them to Answer:

or where I shamelessly steal my favorite questions from previous award winners 😛

1. What’s your favorite part of blogging so far?
2. What’s the story behind your blog name and why you started blogging?
3. Do you schedule posts in advance or do you prefer to write when you’re ready to post?
4. What’s your favorite book and why? (You don’t have to pick just one)
5. What advice would you give to new bloggers?
6. Do you like to cook? And if so, do you have a favorite dish?
7. Do your friends and family read your blog?
8. What is your guilty pleasure TV show?
9. Who was your favorite band/musician in high school?
10. What do you enjoy most about the fall?
11. Do you have any pets? And if so, what are they?