#introventure

[bookintroventure-blog]

About Introventure

At the beginning of 2017, I made a decision – not a resolution, but a decision – to disconnect from “soundbite social media.” You know, the ones where you communicate in vague, cryptic blurbs and hope that somebody cares enough to make a discussion out of it. I have no judgment against people who use social media effectively, but for my personal situation, it was becoming all-too toxic and I just had to sever ties.

Unfortunately, this left me with a noticeable void. You see, I’m not a very social person in real life – I don’t have anything against people, but I find it hard to say the right things on the spot and social interaction usually leaves me feeling anxious and exhausted. I avoid it if I can, choosing to instead talk to my coworkers during shifts, and then come home and socialize online. Without those soundbite social media sites, I found myself starved for – and let’s be honest here – attention. I needed to express myself, and feel as though I was being heard, and I wasn’t getting that lying in bed with a giant-sized Hershey Cookies-n-Creme bar, marathoning all eight seasons of Psych with my cat. I was falling into a pit of helpless depression, and I knew I needed to find an outlet.

Fortunately, I’d also made a decision to make 2017 my 52-in-52 year. 52 books in 52 weeks, reading one (maybe more?) each week. I have always been an avid reader – in fact, when I was in school and my grades were slipping, my mother gave my teachers permission to check my bag and make sure I hadn’t brought any recreational reading to distract me in class. I know: How Harriet-the-Spy is that? Not to mention ineffective; I was still a terrible student, but now I was terrible and grumpy. But I digress.

As an adult (and after a fortuitous discovery of BookOutlet.com, which you will hear me gush over very regularly, I’m sure), I have half a dozen bookshelves bogged down with hundreds of books, but I realized one day that I was hardly making a dent in my reading anymore. It had fallen to the wayside in favor of sewing projects and podcasts and really a lot of meaningless stuff. I needed to get back to devouring books like a Mirrormask sphinx, instead of just hoarding them and letting them collect dust. So with a very generous $50 gift card to my favorite book site and a perfectly-timed sale, I ordered myself fifteen books (and since have ordered seven more, whoops!), and vowed to myself that I would read them all by the end of the year, and then some. 52-in-52. Let’s do it.

And then came the (albeit a bit obvious) revelation: I needed to read books. I needed to speak and feel like I was being heard. I needed to start a book blog! A place I could use to not only hold myself accountable for my reading by documenting it, but also feed my need for expression with reviews and recommendations and quotations and the like. So I signed up, and here we are: Introventure. My year (and longer, I’m sure) of adventure in books – I hope you’ll tag along with me! Maybe you’ll add a few interesting reads to your list, maybe you can recommend some good ones to me, maybe we’ll just have some stuff in common and we’ll all be a little less alone. If books have taught me anything, it’s that anything – from falling in love with a ghost to fighting for your life in the ruins of a dystopian world – is possible.

Sincerely, E. Wise The Introventurer

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