Bookish Birthdays Abound!

Okay to drink when you're 3 years old, yes?

On October 1st, 2009, The New Dork Review of Books was born! Can you believe it? And three years,  277 posts, untold number of comments, more than 110 reviews, only a few bad feelings, and much, much, much fun, it's still going (relatively) strong!

And if that's not enough to get your blood racing, here's this: Book Riot turns ONE today! (Click the link for Riot editor Jeff's stats on the first year of rioting.)

On this day of dual-bookish-birthdays, I figured it'd be fun to look back at some posts from each site — sort of a quasi-clips show. Enjoy!

Five Favorite New Dork Review of Book Posts (not necessarily best, just my favorites, and in no order):
5. Top Five Sins of the Reviewer — No. 1 response to this: Man, I do all these. Don't worry, I do too.

4. Should Art Be Separated From Artist? — A quasi-stroll into philosophy, with comment-y results.

3. A Dude's Guide To The Help — Believe it or not, I read The Help. It's good!

2. Top 10 Books I Wish I Could Read Again For the First Time — I almost never participate in the bookish memes all around the interwebs, but I couldn't resist for this one. It struck a nerve.

1. What's It Called When You Write About Your Own Life? — This is actually my favorite post, because it's my least favorite post. It went up in early January, 2010, and it taught me quickly that if you're lazy and you put bullshit on the Internet, people will call you on it. So this was an eye-opener. Plus, not only is the idea behind it stupid, it's just a badly written post — something I always look at for inspiration. Is that strange?


Five Favorite Book Riot Posts.
5. Reading Pathway: David Foster Wallace — This was one of my first posts - it went up Oct. 27, 2011 — and the one I probably wrote and rewrote the most. I wanted this "tribute" to my favorite writer's work to be perfect. It's not, but it's still one of my favorite BR posts.

4. A Dude's Guide To The Hunger Games — Believe it or not, I read The Hunger Games. Stranger still, I liked it a lot. I did this post back in March, and it earned me accusations of sexism! That was surprising, but funny.

3. Good Writers, Bad Blurbs — Probably the most fun BR post to work on, this involved going through all my shelves in search of laughingly bad blurbs. This post also got me onto The Huffington Post for the first time, which damn near caused my head to explode.

2. Matching Up? Book Quotes and Their Movie Counterparts — While this was generally ignored from a readership standpoint, this was a really fun post to work on because it's something I'd always wondered about.

1. George Orwell's 1984 vs. Real 1984 — Silly, but fun. My first BR post that "hit."