Karen

A nice cup of tea for me too. You just can't beat it!

Hi Supergran, welcome back. I've also made a return after being AWOL for a while... in fact it seems we both decided to make a return on the same day.

Thanks for the welcome everyone. I recognise a few of the names above, but it seems I didn't make too much of an impression during my time here afterall seeing as no-one seems to remember me all that well. (I feel a bit stupid now after what I said in my initial post!) Ah, well, never mind. It's still good to be back, so I guess that's all that matters.

I think book snobbery is part and parcel of the reading world as a whole. I read a lot of chick lit and, more recently, have started to branch out into the contemporary romance genre. Now I know there are a lot of people out there (and probably here on BCF too) who wouldn't even consider reading a book from either of these genres, which is fair enough as it's their/your choice, but I do sometimes feel that people judge ME for reading them. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of trashy chick lit and romance books out there, but there are also a lot of really well written and enjoyable books which are tagged with these genres which probably get overlooked because of the way they are marketed. Just because I may be reading a book with a girly pink cover doesn't mean I'm a dumb blonde. I think Bree made a really good point earlier about not judging someone for the type of book they read when you don't know the reasons why they picked that book to begin with. I like a good hard-hitting crime novel like the best of them, but then again sometimes after a hard day at work I like to curl up and escape reality for a while and, for me, chick lit and contemporary romance fits that bill perfectly. At the end of the day I like to read and I don't care what genre a book is as long as it fits my needs at that particular point in time. It doesn't matter what genre it is or who wrote it as long as it's a good read!

I love quotes and keep a record of the most memorable ones in a simple Word document. The majority of them are taken from books, but I also have a collection from movies and even television shows. I always used to jot down the page number while reading but more recently I've started using post-it flags to mark the exact place on the page. The official post-it ones are the best because they're really sticky and reusable but I recently found some greats ones in Waterstones which work just as well and are a lot cheaper.

I'm slightly obsessed with buying books and could definitely do with joining some kind of support group. I've lost count of how many books I've bought over the last few years alone, but one thing I can say is that the majority of them are still waiting for me to read. My TBR pile is HUGE at the moment - I've just checked and it's currently sitting at 881 books - so my goal for the rest of this year is to concentrate solely on bringing that number down, which means I definitely can't buy any more! I'm also going to make more of an effort to read some of the books that have been on that list for many, many years!

I'm not sure how many of you WILL actually remember me because it's been a while since I last visited BCF... almost four years in fact. Michelle has been good enough to make a few changes to my old account in order to allow me to re-register with my old email and username... hence the new account/old username. A mixture of real life factors and online dramas (not BCF related) made me take a complete step back from the internet as a whole and as a result I lost touch with a lot of people, many of whom were from here. Believe me when I say I used to spend a LOT of time here and during my two years or so registered here on BCF I made some really good friends and I have some very fond memories of my time here. If any of you do remember me from before I really am truly sorry for just disappearing without any warning, it was nothing personal and the fault was all mine. I'm slowly making a return back to the web but limiting myself to Twitter, GoodReads and good ol' Book Club Forum so hopefully, providing you don't mind me returning after a four year absence, I'll be seeing you around the board and I look forward to getting to know you all again. I really have missed you guys and gals!