A Little-ish Introduction

In which I chronicle my online life in books and ponder why I want to dip my toes back into writing more than Instagram captions.

I started writing about books on the Internet back in 2008, just as I was finishing college. I was heading to graduate school and I channeled some of that anxiety — What will it be like? Will I make friends? Can I even hack it? — into launching a book blog. I’m not sure it helped with that anxiety, but it certainly changed the course of my life.

I have a lot of thoughts about how pivotal that moment of the bookish Internet actually was, but that’s a potential essay for a future time. The blog’s name, “Sophisticated Dorkiness,” was inspired by a comment from a charming, hipster ex-boyfriend, who once told me it was ok to have tastes that ranged from dorky to cool, and I should just own the things I loved regardless of what people thought. That’s obvious to me now, but to 21-year-old Kim who was deeply uncertain about her presence in the world, that felt like a revelation.

That blog was my home on the Internet for more than a decade. It connected me with readers and friends around the world. I went to book events in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I wrote freelance book reviews for publications throughout the Midwest. And I was invited to be an original contributor to Book Riot, an online startup that’s now the top independent book site in the United States.

The bookish friends I made along the way have been the best thing ever. There are so many more people I should include, I just can't find picture right nows.

Two of the other defining moments of the last decade were the death of my partner, Nate, in 2016, and being laid off from the community newspaper where I worked in 2017. In the course of about seven months, my entire life (and more crucially, the story I had about my life) was dismantled.

I’ve processed (and continued to process) both of those experiences privately and in therapy — the point in this context is that even when I was in a place where I wanted to share my love of reading again, that blog never felt like the right space. I think it represented a relic of a life I didn’t have anymore, and that feeling meant my writing there was sporadic, at best, over the next several years. It breaks my heart a little that losing Nate meant losing a lot of what the blog represented… but in the end the blog was just a container, of sorts, and the community I found there has never really gone away.

It’s also relevant that I found a few other ways to channel my bookish energy. In 2017 I helped launch a nonfiction newsletter, True Story, for Book Riot. I was also hired to work in communications for a public library system, which is both about and not about books, but certainly made books a more daily part of my life. And finally in 2018, I helped launch Book Riot’s nonfiction podcast, For Real, with my dear friend Alice.

Podcasting with Alice is one of my favorite projects, and working at a library (while challenging) is also full of delights and great coworkers.

Those three things — newsletter, library, and podcast — filled up most of the space I had for writing about books, and felt like enough. Then we all went through 2020 and 2021 and it started to feel like more than enough, and then too much. Without getting into the details, in 2022 I chose to wrap up my time at Book Riot. As of January 2023, I had no bookish obligations outside of my job for the first time since 2008. What??

I am a person who loves a project and loves to feel productive, but at that moment I knew I need to take some time away. I made an agreement with myself that I wouldn’t start anything new for at least three months. At the end of March, I still didn’t feel inspired to start a project, so I decided to extend that break. And extend it. And extend it. And extend it… until now.

So What’s The Plan?

The one consistent thing I have done this year is post monthly reading wrap-ups on Instagram. And while these 2,200-character posts have been fun, I finally feel like I want to do something more — thanks, back to school energy!

Posting book photos outside on my deck is fun in the spring, summer, and fall, but feels like a stupid idea when I’m doing it in the winter!

Hence, a newsletter. I decided to keep the name Sophisticated Dorkiness for this project because I still love it, and I think it still captures how I want to be in the world — a thoughtful dork who digs deep into the things I love, whether that’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir or the latest romantasy bestseller.

For the moment, I’m committing to monthly reading wrap-up posts, and I guarantee those will always be free and available. Sophisticated Dorkiness 2.0 might eventually turn into more, I am not sure — at this point, I don’t have any solid ideas (or interest) in doing paid features, but maybe that could change. For now, I just like the format of a newsletter, which feels more solid than social media but less technically complicated than blogging.

I hope some people will want to read what I am thinking of as a reading journal — with comments, because I do still love talking about books — but who knows! For now, it’s a little experiment to see what fits best in this particular season of my life. Thanks for being here!