The Infinite Shelf has Moved! :D

Hello all!

I am very, very happy to announce that The Infinite Shelf now has its own home! Please visit and update your bookmarks and feeds; I would be so sad to loose you along the way!

Click Here to visit The Infinite’s Shelf ‘s new home!

http://www.infinitecurio.com/

Thank you, and see you on the other side!

It’s time for a new look!

You can’t see it if you are reading this in a feed reader, but if you are stopping by the blog itself, I feel a reassurance is in order. Dear readers, your eyes do not deceive you: this blog has a new look!

In three years of blogging, the Infinite Shelf has almost always had the same layout : 3 columns, with the banner, background and colors changing from time to time. I have played around with fonts and widgets for the sidebars, but it’s always been mostly the same.

Lately, I’ve started to feel a need for change. The Shelf felt crowded to me, and every time I looked at it there was just so much stuff! I wanted something cleaner, lighter, 2 columns with a minimum of information and design elements – without taking the completely minimalist route. I’ve been testing many designs but, until I accidentally tried this one for the French side of the blog (which I have recently revived), I hadn’t found one that worked so well for me! I like its simplicity, and I like that I will be able to feature photography in a much, much better way, either with galleries or with bigger pictures, something I couldn’t do before! It’s possible there will be even more change once I get my own domain and all, but for now I feel really, really good about this! 🙂

Just for fun, here are a few of the look’s I’ve had before (sadly I don’t have any pictures of the few layouts I had from January 2009 to the summer of 2009) :

Summer 2009 – May 2010

Where you can clearly see that I have always had a love for black and white monochrome and pink. This was also the introduction as comic-me in the banner! 🙂

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May 2010 – May 2011

I regret that I didn’t think of taking a larger screenshot of this one, since I had it and loved it for about a year!

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May 2011 – February 2012

This is the one you’ve come to know if you have visited here in the past few months. I have loved this one, but even good things must come to an end. It was time to try something new!

I feel that for the first time in years, I have made a really big change in this blog’s look. I really wanted something simple and clean, as neutral as possible so that pictures and reviews would “pop” more. I’m quite happy with it, and I will be tweaking it a little more to my liking in the coming weeks. I hope you guys will love it too! 🙂

Today, this Shelf is 3 years old!

Happy Blogoversary!!!

To you my fellow readers, without whom this whole experience would feel very solitary, I offer some cupcakes!

(the Man of the House brought these home last night, and let me tell you, the two we ate were de-li-cious!)

So, this is the post where, every year, I exclaim about how so much time has passed, and how I can’t believe I’m still working on my blog. The sentiment still holds after three years, and I don’t feel like stopping any time soon!

Though my master’s degree might take more of my free time in the coming year, I do have great plans for the Infinite Shelf; in 2012, I want to get my own domain, renew the blog’s look and decide which direction I want to take with it. I’ve had on my mind to create a separate blog for my photography and other hobbies for a little while, because I fear various posts on knitting, photography, cooking might drive people away from the Shelf. I love to know other aspects of book bloggers’ lives, but surely not everyone feels the same. What do you think?

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For now, because lists and stats are always fun, here are a few numbers for the shelf’s past 3 years! 

90,254 visitors (that’s twice as much as this time last year! impressive!)

6171 comments

626 posts (627 with this one)

Most viewed and commented post : While in Versailles – Some thoughts on Photography (it was also my second post to be Freshly Pressed! Yay! :D)

22 560 spam comments blocked by Akismet (scary!)

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I want to take this occasion to thank :

Our cat, who keeps my hands warm when I try to type my reviews.

The Man of the House, who entertains me with his jokes, like “Don’t you have too many books?” and “Why buy more books? You already got two last week!” He’s so funny! And very understanding of my silliness, I must add. 🙂

You, my dear readers and bloggers, for keeping me company, putting new books on my shelves and commenting on the Infinite Shelf.

♥ I love you! ♥

Here we are, December!

It comes every year too fast, it’s true. We’re celebrating New Year, making resolutions and promises and, before we know it, BAM!

We’re starting a new year again.

2011 has been eventful to say the least, though you’d probably never guess it by going through this year’s blog posts. I took something like a break from blogging at the end of my winter semester, when tests and papers didn’t allow me time for reading or blogging (or anything fun, for that matter). Then this fall, we had to deal with some unfortunate situation in our building and it just took so much out of me, that I almost disappeared from the blogging world in November. I didn’t get much reading done then, either, but that’s okay; I’ve learned that forcing reading when I don’t feel like it only makes me hate whatever I’m reading.

And now it’s December, and it seems that the coming holidays woke up that “reading and blogging” spark in me again! I’m glad for it, because it means I can maybe reach some of my goals before then.

For one, I want to catch up with my review pile. It’s HUGE, to say the least. I believe there are still books from 2010 in there. I’m a horrible reviewer, I know; but at least, I take notes while I read, so all I need to do is mostly add a small introduction, a summary, a few “and”, “but”, “while” in between my thoughts and these reviews will be ready to go. What I need to figure out is : how relevant are theses reviews for The Infinite Shelf? I don’t want to crowd the blog with a pile of senseless reviews, so I’ll have to skip those that I don’t really want to talk about.

I also want to put some more thoughts on changing – again – the blog’s look. Maybe. I’m not sure about that yet. I know exactly what I want, but I haven’t been able to find a template that suits all my demands at once. And the thought of starting from scratch? Scary. So I might keep this look for a while. Although I am seriously considering tweaking it for the holidays season. We’ll see 🙂

Anyone else excited for the holidays? Making some plans for reading and blogging in December?

BBAW – Day 4 – Reading and Blogging

Today’s BBAW topic explores the dynamic that exists between reading and blogging; click here to join the fun or read more answers! 🙂

Has book blogging changed the way you read? Have you discovered books you never would have apart from book blogging? How has book blogging affected your book acquisition habits? Have you made new connections with other readers because of book blogging?

Blogging has changed my reading habits in more ways that I can count, I’m sure! There’s really been a shift in how I read since I first joined bookish communities like Goodreads or Librarything, but the biggest changes occurred, without a doubt, when I first started my blog and started visiting others. These have been positive changes (though the shelves wincing under the weight of numerous books might disagree!) that directly impacted the quality of my reading. So let’s just try counting some of the ways my reading has changed since The Infinite Shelf’s humble beginnings :

1. Discovering new books and authors : This is without a doubt the first change that comes to mind. Many authors I probably wouldn’t have come across otherwise, like John Green, Scott Westerfeld and David Levithan for instance, have now become favorites of mine – and those are only the YA ones!
2. Buying books in a more reasonable way : The Man of the House would probably argue that we have different notions of “reasonable”, but the truth is, I am a lot more careful about which books I buy. I read lots of reviews and most often than not take a peek at Goodreads and Librarything before I add a book to my shelves. It’s not really about whether the book has been well-received, but more about whether it is a good fit for me.
3. Letting Go : Discovering so many new books means that I want to read many more, so I’ve learned to let go of the books I don’t enjoy. I’m a lot more critical about this than I used to be, although I won’t put a book aside forever if I feel that I’m just reading the wrong book at the wrong time. I have also let go of series that weren’t right for me, and it has made my reading life much more rewarding!
4. Reading More : When I started blogging, I thought it would eat what little time I had to read. Instead, adding so many new books to my wishlist and TBR piles is only more motivation to read. I don’t wait for the reading time to “happen” as much as I used to (like in the subway or just before bed). I have gone back to what I used to do years ago, taking the conscious decision to just sit, relax and read more frequently.
5. Sharing : If writers write to be heard, I believe readers read to share. Share the experience of a story, or a knowledge, with the author; but also share with each other. There are a few readers among my friends and my family but none that really completely matches my taste in books. Blogging is a wonderful tool because it gives you the opportunity to share the excitement you lived through the pages with other readers. It’s awesome, and probably the most precious aspect of it all 😀

BBAW 2011!

I am so excited for the coming of Book Blogger Appreciation Week 2011! Each year, it is a wonderful event that not only gives us the chance to celebrate our hard work as book bloggers, but also to get to celebrate the precious relationships we formed in the process.  Because, as we all come to know, book blogging is about much more than the books themselves.

I thought I would quickly mention it for those who, like me, often succeed in missing important news even though they are on everyone’s blogs. There’s a day left if you want to register and vote for some of your favorite blogs and books 🙂 So, click through and get to it!

As for me, I’ll be waiting for this week twice as much since I didn’t get to participate last year. Blogging is a wonderful experience and I wouldn’t have stuck to it if not for the wonderful peeps I met in the process 🙂

Are you as excited as I am for the coming BBAW?

I know my feed reader suffers from it terribly every year, because of all the fantastic blogs I discover and add to it!