Armchair BEA: Introductions First!

Since I'm not able to make it to NYC for the actual BEA conference, I decided to participate in Armchair BEA and today is the first day. For the first day, we are asked to answer five questions so that the other people participating in the event and our readers can get to know us better. So without further ado, here's a little more about me.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? How long have you been blogging? Why did you get into blogging?

If it wasn't obvious by my blog's name, I'm Emilie and I'm a 21-year-old university student. Come the fall I'm going to be in my final year of my undergraduate studies, working on a double major in communication and political science. So outside of blogging, a lot of my time is spent studying and doing school-related stuff both for my studies and for my work. As far as blogging is concerned, I've been at it for almost two years and I never even thought I would last this long. As to how I got into blogging, it was kind of out of sheer boredom. The summer after my first year of university I was living alone and I wasn't working so I spent most of my days reading since it was too hot to do anything else. I had been following a few book blogs and I thought I maybe should try my hand at it. I mean, I was reading all these books and wanted to talk about them but I didn't really have anyone with whom I could talk about that. So I figured that if nothing else, starting a book blog would at least give me a place where I could express my thoughts on those books and from there the whole thing just sort of took off.

Tell us one non-book-related thing that everyone reading your blog may not know about you.

English isn't actually my first language. Originally I'm a French-speaker and until I reached middle school my English was relatively limited. But then I started going to school in English and I realized that a lot of the books I had been reading in French were actually translated from English so I decided to read the original versions. I still speak French whenever I'm home or with my family and still read in French from time to time, but nowhere near as much as I used to, especially since I've been going to school in English ever since and I now live in a more anglophone area.

Where do you see your blog in five years?

I really have no idea. When I first started blogging almost two years ago I didn't even thinkI would keep it up for that long. But it didn't take long for blogging to become a pretty important part of my life. I guess in five years I would want to still be keeping it up. I don't necessarily have high expectations as to what my blog will become but I'm at least hoping that I will still be reading as much as I am now and still talking about those books I'm reading. So basically, in five years I still want to be blogging but my blog doesn't need to have become something big and amazing.

What literary location would you most like to visit? Why?

I've always had a thing for mermaid stories and when I was a kid I was obsessed with The Little Mermaid (arguably, you could say I still am sometimes) so if I could visit a literary location I would pick an underwater mermaid world. It would just be awesome to see how the mermaids really live and to experience living in an underwater world. Though I have my suspicions that if I were actually able to visit a mermaid world it would only make my obsession with mermaids even worse.

Have your reading tastes changed since you started blogging? How?

My reading tastes haven't changed all that much since I've started blogging. Before I started blogging I was reading YA and that's still what I read now. I would say the main difference is that I read a lot more different genres within YA. Before blogging I mostly only read contemporary and paranormal but now I've widened my tastes. The other way my reading habits have changed is that I read a lot less in French than I used to. Before I started blogging my reading was not a perfect 50/50 division between French and English but there was a lot more French than there is now. Though that might also have to do with the fact that there are less French books around where I am living now.

Come back tomorrow for the second day of Armchair BEA to find out what have been some of my favorite reads of 2012 so far and maybe even a giveaway.