From Laughing Listener To Quixotic Reads: A New Blogging Era
Honestly, I never thought I would be writing a blog post again. When I gave up my former book website The Laughing Listener a few years ago, it was with a what-was-I-thinking mentality that had me convinced I would never type another blog post. Hours and hours of work for the sporadic free book? No way. But life is funny, isn’t it? The moment you think never again, a life ninja pops up to punch you in the throat. Today, I’m back with my new blog, Quixotic Reads, and the journey to get here has been long but fulfilling.
When I initially created The Laughing Listener in 2017, it was with a desperate need to escape my everyday life. I stumbled upon a newfound love of reading while working at a dead-end office job. It was pretty much Office Space, and I was the guy obsessed with his stapler, only that stapler was audiobooks. I went through them like water, sometimes reading 3 in a week–my Goodreads had never seen so much action. And when I spoke to a friend about it one day, they said, “I wish we could just get paid to read books,” and my first thought was, why can’t we? I may not be able to get paid to sit around and read, but I can make this a bigger part of my life and create a community of people to share it with.
The next day, I started researching blogs and how to create them. The title Laughing Listener was born out of sheer panic when my preferred name (which I can’t even remember now) was already taken. In the beginning, I beat myself up over it. The laughing listener?! That’s not even directly book-related! People will never get it, I would think to myself. But over time, it grew on me. It reflected who I was and wanted to be–someone happy and carefree with an unhealthy love of audiobooks. And for a while, that’s exactly who I was. I found a community of amazing peers who loved the same stories I did, created lasting friendships, and even became the co-host of a podcast. I’m so grateful for The Laughing Listener because it helped shape who I am. However, it all started going sideways when it became too much of who I was. Over time, I started thinking more and more about follower counts, website traffic, advanced reader copies, blogging schedules, and blah blah blah. There was always something new to obsess over, and I started losing sight of why I had started blogging in the first place.
Eventually, I decided to close up shop and let my domain hosting expire, choosing instead to turn that energy towards myself. I moved, got a new job I love, and rediscovered my love of stories. I never got rid of my book socials, which have been a great creative outlet on this journey of self-discovery. But lately, I’ve been feeling the itch again. I have all these ideas and nowhere to put them, and I realized how much I missed it. After much Googling and list-making, I finally settled on a new blog name that feels perfect for who I am now: Quixotic Reads.
“Quixotic: foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals. Marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action. Capricious, unpredictable.”
Is this a word people use in their everyday vocabulary? Because I had no idea what it meant a few weeks ago. Now that I know, though, I’m kind of obsessed. It feels like the perfect fit for this new era of book blogging and who I am now–a goofy lover of romance books who will do anything to achieve what they want. I’m not too sure about the capricious part, but whatever, I’m embracing it.
My hope for Quixotic Reads is for it to become a sanctuary for book lovers and to get back to what I loved about them in the first place. And hopefully, I can help other bibliophiles find new stories to obsess over and make new friends along the way.
