What to do when you have found two interesting book memes and want to do both, but you don’t want to write two different blog posts? Combine, them I say.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My teasers:

[amazon_image id=”0345521307″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” class=”alignleft”]The Paris Wife: A Novel[/amazon_image]“This isn’t a detective story—not hardly. I don’t want to say, Keep watch for the girl who will come along and ruin everything, but she’s coming anyway, set on her course in a gorgeous chipmunk coat and fine shoes, her sleek brown hair bobbed so close to her well-made head she’ll seem like a pretty otter in my kitchen.”

—location 116 on my [amazon_link id=”B002Y27P3M” target=”_blank” ]Kindle[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0345521307″ target=”_blank” ]The Paris Wife: A Novel[/amazon_link] by Paula McLain

The Broke and the Bookish has a weekly Top Ten. This week’s focus is book blogging.

Top Ten Reasons I Love Book Blogging

1. The other book bloggers in the community are some of the nicest people on the Internet. I enjoy being a part of such a friendly group.
2. Book blogging offers me a chance to reflect on (as well as keep track of) all the books I read. It’s nice to be able to look back at books I’ve read and know not only exactly how many I read, but also how I felt about them.
3. Blogging has opened some doors for me in terms of being able to afford more books. I am an Amazon associate, and the good people who buy books from Amazon after clicking through a link I followed generate a small commission that Amazon pays me in gift cards. It feels a little bit like being paid for doing something I love, but it has also enabled me to do what I love—not sure I could buy all these books otherwise.
4. This last year especially had some real professional ups and downs for me, and this blog was a refuge. I blog about education at huffenglish.com, and I have found it harder to feel motivated to write for that blog lately for many reasons, but this blog has been a true source of inspiration.
5. Through this blog and through Twitter, I have had the opportunity to interact with authors. Syrie James and Jael McHenry both have mentioned my reviews of their books, and I had the amazing opportunity to interview Mary Novik.
6. Being a part of the book blogging community has introduced books and authors to me that I might otherwise not have heard about or read. It would be impossible to figure out how many wonderful books I discovered through other book bloggers.
7. Participating in reading challenges and chronicling them on my blog has helped me try out new books. I have enjoyed many of these new books. Some challenges I have begun to look forward to every year (Carl’s RIP Challenge, for one). For the first time this year, I hosted my own challenge.
8. Book bloggers inspire me to read more. One year a few years ago, I only read 14 books. This year, I’ve already read 21. Some book bloggers are such fast readers that I can never hope to compete with the speed through which they fly through books, but without the inspiration to try, I’m not sure what my reading life would look like. My friends tell me all the time they don’t know how I read so much or how I find the time. Little do they know there is this world of readers in the book blogosphere who far outstrip anything I do! I do think I have become a faster reader since I began blogging.
9. There is no better community for talking about books and reading than the book blogging community. Everyone else loves reading as much as I do and is just as excited about reading as I am. Reading can be a lonely activity. I’m not part of a book club, but I plan to revive our faculty book club next school year. It’s fun to share books and reading with others. It’s one of the reasons I chose to be an English teacher. Now that I am moving into technology teaching, it will be more important than ever for me to have an outlet for talking about books. The only thing that could be better is if we could gather regularly with food and chat in person.
10. This last one might seem silly, but I find that book blogs are the prettiest blogs I read. All the pretty book covers and headers with books or readers of cups or coffee or tea. So homey and pretty. I like hanging around places like that.