Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025

ByBrooke Lorren
15 Comments

Hello! Today’s Top Ten Tuesday Topic is “Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025.” I read…

Hello! Today’s Top Ten Tuesday Topic is “Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025.” I read 87 books last year, but this seems to me like it’s going to be a difficult topic again. I’m going to do my best though. Not all of these bookish discoveries will be from the reader’s perspective, because a lot of my “bookish” progress I made was on the writing side of things.

1.  Bookish Networking—So one of the biggest things that happened to me last year was a little bit of bookish networking. My husband will reach his second anniversary of working at our local library district in a couple months (which means I can’t work at the library—boo! But he gets paid really well). Anyway, his boss is really awesome and is one of my Duolingo friends (and is my Duolingo partner for this week’s friend’s quest, in fact).

Anyway, I went to the annual Mountain of Authors event, and I was invited to go to an awards ceremony sponsored by our local Friends of the Library. My husband had a ticket that he wasn’t going to use, so I got to take it. It was nice getting to sit with the local library people.

2. Pitch to Published—This is a writer’s group that is really awesome. It’s a great way to network with other writers, AND every month there’s an agent call where three people go over their queries with an agent, as well as an editor call where an editor goes over someone’s pages with them. I’ve learned so much about the writing process with this group, plus I’ve made several writer friends.

3. Rebecca Danzenbaker—Not only is she a new to me author (she wrote Soulmatch), she is also a member of Pitch to Published. The pitch for her book was pretty amazing. Plus her book is really interesting too.

4. Kristy Boyce—She writes some Dungeons and Dragons contemporary YA books. As in, romance stories involving people playing D&D games. I play D&D; I like YA books. So I thought these were pretty good.

5. Alison Saft—I’m pretty sure I remember some of her tweets from back in the Twitter days. I got the chance to read one of her books this year, and have another one on hold at the library.

6. The Zettlekasten Method—I like to learn things. Sometimes it’s hard to remember some of the things that you’ve read about, or where you learned about a particular item. I learned a new way to take notes, keep the reference to where you learned the item, and group the note with similar items in order to make sense of things. I started to take notes this way and it’s really helped me to find things I’ve read about and reference them long after I’m done reading them.

So there’s only six things this week. I wish I had more, but as I posted a few weeks ago, it was fairly difficult to come up with ten books that were new to me that really stood out. Not that I didn’t read good books, but there weren’t a lot of new-to-me books that were like “Wow!” I hope to change that this year. What bookish discoveries did you make last year?

15 Comments

    1. Their nepotism policy says that the family members of two people can’t work in the library: the head of Human Resources and the COO. He’s the head of Human Resources.

      My son volunteers for their IT department, but he can’t get paid either. 🙁

    2. Wanted to reply about the Zettlekasten Method. So today I was writing a blog post (that’s going out on Thursday) where I needed to look up a note I took about education in the late Roman Empire. I have a index of my notes in an Access database. Anyway, I was able to find what I was looking for within a few minutes! And I could do the same with notes I took about subjects as varied as Roman currency depreciation, Vladimir Putin, or even birds crapping on the athletes during the 1936 Olympics (LOL).

    1. It’s such an easy way to take and organize your notes :-). And what’s kind of cool about it is, if you find something interesting on a topic (say, the Roman devaluation of currency) and take notes on it, and then a year later, find something else interesting on the topic, you can file the notes together. So later, if you want to write about that topic, you have all your notes in one place and it’s easy to organize.

      I index my notes in an Access database with tags so everything is fairly easy to find.

    1. It was a good year. Since my grand-cat has been sick for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been a little derailed, but he’s getting better so I’m slowly getting into the swing of things.

    1. They only open up every five or six months, and they just opened up to a new group of writers. If your husband is interested, he should sign up for her course on getting an agent (Get a Book Deal 101). She’s looking for serious writers so at the moment, she’s only planning on opening for people who have taken her course (on getting a book deal). That would be the best way to find out about when she opens again. She periodically hosts seminars and you can get a discount on the course if you take it.

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