Hello Blogosphere!

Hello blogosphere! My name is Sam (short for Samantha or Samwise Gamgee, depending on who you ask. Either or neither may be my real-life name.) and I’m a Catholic homeschooled high school book dragon. I’ve followed the book blogging community for a long time (maybe two years?) anonymously and without commenting, which was killing me. I’m very excited, therefore, to announce my blog, Bookshire, wherein I’m hoping to publish weekly book reviews and depending on how it goes, perhaps talk about my writing projects, the Faith, and life. I’ll be trying out different formats for the reviews, so bear with me!

A little bit more about me:

·       I read generally 3-7 books per week (I’m a very fast reader).

·       I have a pair of fantastic parents (Aragorn and Arwen), and four fabulous siblings (Legolas, Eomer, Galadriel and Gandalf).

·       “Why ‘Bookshire”?” you may ask. Because when I was younger, when I was reading I literally would not hear anything in the outside world, including anyone talking to me. The house could have been on fire and I would have been trying to finish my chapter before doing anything. This led to Aragorn coining the phrase “She’s in Bookshire” for whenever I was reading a book and couldn’t hear him talking to me.

·       Our family has an urban farm with goats, ducks, chickens, bunnies and barn cats.

·       I’m taking dual-credit classes at a nearby community college, and loving it (most of the time)!

·       For a while when I was younger I struggled with making friends, but now I have a fabulous squad: Frodo, Merry, Pippin and Eowyn. Please do not try to infer anything about gender here, some of my siblings hated my initial gender-proper LOTR names for them, so they got all messed up. 😊 Also, we may or may not actually call each other this in real life.

·       As you may have guessed, I recently read Lord of the Rings and am now completely obsessed.

·       I’m INTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale. This does not affect my life in any meaningful way.

·       I’m also a Ravenclaw in a family of three Ravenclaws, two Gryffindors, a Hufflepuff and a Slytherin.

·       My favorite saints are St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Benedict, St. John Paul II, St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Maria Goretti, and Mary, of course.

·       My favorite religious order is the Dominicans. Our parish is staffed with Dominican priests, and this leads to endless Dominican vs. Franciscan vs. Jesuit jokes.

I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you, and getting started with this new adventure!