First off, yes, I have abandoned this blog for the last three months. I am a human disaster. I swear I will be better in 2016. I have no excuses, blog, I'm so sorry.

With that being said, 2015 is coming to a close! I know, I can't believe it, either. There will be a lot of different things in this post, so I will try my best to keep it as clear and easy to follow as possible. Here we go.

This month was weird. I look at my spreadsheet and see that I read quite a few things so, in that regard, I'm quite pleased. On the flip side, I put three books onto a shiny new "dnf" Goodreads shelf and had quite a few more that I just didn't end up enjoying. All said and done, August was definitely about quantity over quality.

Hi, I'm Allison and welcome to my blog. Books and Balks isn't a new idea. I've been trying to maintain a book (and otherwise) blog for quite some time but, no matter how hard I put my mind to it, I always seem to abandon it within a few weeks. This time, I will hopefully be able to stick to it (as I type those words for the third time).

First, I'll direct you to where I was posting previously, Tumblr. You can find the beginnings of Books and Balks right here. Originally, that Tumblr was simply Allison Reads but I found that incorporating something else I really enjoy, baseball, was a way to keep me interested in writing and posting (yeah, okay, I still ended up forgetting about it). In this revamping, I decided that Tumblr probably wasn't the best choice if I wanted to get serious page views and come across as a blogger who cares (not to say that those on Tumblr do not care, of course). I just think that the .blogspot.com attribute is a little more appealing when coming across a blog. Better capability for comments and discussion only further this appeal.

I will be trying to stick to some sort of schedule. I hope to post at least one book post and one balk post each week - a Top 5 Wednesday or a tag or a State of the Tigers, something like that. I can't make any promises about this regularity but, man, I'm going to try.

A little bit more about me, if you are interested: I'm 23 years old and I live in Michigan. I graduated from college with a degree in sociology in May of 2015. I like baseball, reading, writing, playing the Sims, and drinking iced tea. I'm funny and smart (I think) and am always up for conversation.

Thanks for reading and coming along for the ride.