Reading Rants is over Twenty Years Old!

Can you believe it? Neither can I—Reading Rants is now legal to drink! When Andrew and I first started the site in 1998, we had no idea we’d still be here twenty one years later. Want to read our “birth” announcement? In 1998, there were no “blogs,” no Facebook, and the Internet was still relatively shiny. Now, there are so many places for teens, librarians and teachers to visit to find out about teen literature that we are honored you still choose to come and visit lil’ ole’ us in our small corner of the blogosphere. Of course, we’ve made some changes to keep you happy. We partnered with Amazon.com so that if you see a book you like, you can click on the cover, check out other reviews and purchase the title if you choose. That’s the only concession we’ve made to commercialism in twenty one years of being online, and we hope you appreciate the clean look of the site. Also, in May of 2007, Andrew switched us over to a WordPress blog format, so that teens could finally leave comments about the books they were reading and I could post reviews faster and more easily, instead of sending them via email to Andrew to post. In the early days, I actually used to update pages by snailmail, if you can believe it, printing out individual pages of RR and marking them up with a red pen, then sending them overland to Andrew so he could make the edits. Talk about medieval! But all that is behind us now as we celebrate over twenty years together—your kind emails and often hilarious comments are all the encouragement Andrew and I need to keep RR going as long as you keep reading it. Who knows, maybe you’ll be sending YOUR teenager to look up book reviews on Reading Rants when YOU are a parent! We sure hope so, because the Internet gods willing, we’ll still be here.