This is my 25th year of posting Sonderbooks! And I’ve decided to celebrate.
Well, okay, I’m jumping the gun a tiny bit. But my 2025 Sonderbooks Stand-outs will be my 25th best-of-the-year list. Since I begin working on that list when I begin reading for the year, I figure I’m officially in my 25th year.
Here’s how I plan to celebrate: I’m going to make 25 posts featuring each past year’s Stand-outs. My plan is to read all the reviews, and choose one book to reread. I may or may not write a new review of the chosen book, but I’d like to at least write a blog reflection on looking back at it.
Mind you, choosing just one book is going to be incredibly difficult! I’ve already begun looking at my 2001 Stand-outs and made a list of over 30 books that I’d love to reread. (Though when I realized I really would need to only plan on rereading one book, it was an easy choice.)
While I’m at it, I’m also going to put the Stand-outs pages into the newer phone-friendly format. That’s going to especially take some time with the first five years of posts. But I plan to redo a Stand-out page every couple weeks and then post about that year’s books and what was going on in my life that year. The whole project will take me through most of 2025.
Here’s a little history of Sonderbooks:
I started working half-time at Sembach Air Base Library in Germany in 1998 and started reading more than I ever had before. I was having trouble remembering all the wonderful books I was reading and wanted a way to share them with others. The name was always a no-brainer, because one of the first German words I learned is that “Sonder” is a prefix that means “special.”
So on August 1, 2001, I began writing Sonderbooks. It started out as an email newsletter, and even when I made the website to go with it, only a few issues in, I still called it an ezine. For each issue, I tried to have a reviews in a variety of categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Young Adult Fiction, Children’s Fiction and Nonfiction, and Picture Books. I like to reread (especially back then when I had time for it), so beginning with Sonderbooks #7, every issue included an Old Favorite. I also included a quotation from my current reading at the end of every issue – or, okay, it looks like I started that with Sonderbooks #9. I really did post every week or two (remember, I was only working half-time) and reviewed pretty much every book I read.
When I began, I still had hopes of making a little money as an Amazon associate. (Their rates have gone way down since then, so though I am still an associate, it never even covers the cost of web hosting. I do it for the love of it.) With that in mind, I made a tagline for my ezine:
Discover new books. Discuss old books. Order more books.
So that was all well and good while I lived in Germany. In 2006, my then-husband’s time with the U.S. Air Force Band in Germany was up, and he got himself sent to Japan so I couldn’t follow him. I came to Virginia, got my Master’s in Library Science, and began working full-time in libraries. In 2006, I took a class in library school on web design, and revamped my website. And my friend Deborah Gregory made the lovely logo that I still use today. That was when I added the blogs, because blogs were now a thing. (Hadn’t heard of them in 2001.) I use this main blog, but also included Sonderquotes, which is where I now put quotations from the books I read, and Sonderjourneys, for musings and meditations and stories of travel.
Now instead of ezine issues, I used the blog for those who like to follow my current reading, but the website is great for my own reference when I want to recommend a great book I’ve read. So to this day, reviews show up on the blog, but also get their own webpage. Well, except when I’m in a hurry and trying to catch up on back reviews. I currently have 103 reviews written but waiting to be posted, which is down from 270 last year in February, so I may do some of those blog-only reviews to catch up.
Of course, my 25th year won’t really begin until August 1st, but I thought it would be more fun to celebrate #Sonderbooks25 throughout 2025, since after all, it’s my 25th calendar year of writing Sonderbooks. But I figure I can keep the celebration going all the way until August 1st, 2026, which is the actual 25th anniversary of when I started Sonderbooks.
So – to really get started, I will revamp the webpage for my 2001 Sonderbooks Stand-outs and write a blog post about those wonderful books and what was going on in my life at the time. I’m looking forward to revisiting some fantastic reading! And I’ve begun looking at the books and am pleasantly surprised how many are still carried by Fairfax County Public Library and how many are still in print.
But more on that in the next issue of #Sonderbooks25!
And I’d love it if readers will add to the celebration by commenting about when you first heard of Sonderbooks!