Let's go to the hop, oh, baby!

So I was putting off going to sleep last night, going for one last stroll through the various blogs and travel forums that I follow, when I got a very big, very pleasant surprise:  Rebecca Fabian, author of the incomparable Afterthoughts blogs, had mentioned my blog as part of the third book blogger hop she participated in.  Rebecca is what you might call a mover and shaker in the children's book world--she's bright, knowledgable, hard-working, and her star is definitely on the rise.  We used to work together at the Odyssey Bookshop, where she was the manager of the children's department and I was (and still am) the assistant manager and one of the buyers.  Now she's working as a children's editorial intern at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and in between her full time internship, her work-for-house-and-board arrangement, and her reading, she still manages to find time to keep up her blogs and her book reviews.  She's either borrowed a time turner from that insufferable, know-it-all Gryffindor or she's learned to bend the fourth dimension to her will in other ways.  Thus it was that I was absurdly (and probably disproportionately) pleased for her to mention me.

Though I started my book & travel blog in January 2009, it's only been for the last few months that I've updated it with anything like regularity.  Mostly because I've discovered that I enjoy doing it, as opposed to merely feeling like I ought to be doing it.  It also helped that at least one person who wasn't related to me or who didn't work for me or who hasn't ever been my roommate finally started following it this summer.  It was about two weeks ago that I discoverd the "Stats" tab on the Blogger dashboard, and ever since I've been a tad bit obsessed with discovering who in the world might be reading my blog.  Apparently I'm all the rage in Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia.  That is, if you interpret "all the rage" rather loosely to mean that more than a dozen people a week in those countries are reading it.  Or perhaps the same person, a dozen times.  I'm not sure.  Still, it thrilled me more than I should probably admit that somebody, somewhere, was actually reading my blog.  I mean, come on.  Latvia!

But I digress...my original point was to talk about the Book Blogger Hop, taking place this weekend, which you can read about here. It's like the cool clam bake for book bloggers, where you can meet & greet and find other like-minded book people to read & follow. 

According to the rules, in order to include yourself on the Book Blogger Hop, you must also post about it in your own blog as well as give a list of some of your favorite book blogs.  I already listed Rebecca's above, but I don't follow too many others, and those I do already are well known: Bookdwarf, for one.  The one from Algonquin publishing, for another. So go to the Hop.  Socks optional.  Towel required, especially on Thursdays (not to be confused with Thursday Next).