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If you
are reading these words, there is a pretty excellent chance
that you have decided to return to our corner of the internet.
We would collectively like to express our deepest gratitude
to you, cyber-friend! I hope it is okay to assume that you
enjoyed your first experience with us enough to warrant a
second visit, and that is supremely awesome of you.
As the
good ship HBC floats along these treacherous and icy e-waters,
we're all learning. Until we become a monolith internet presence
of momentous, Oprah-shadowing proportions, we most certainly
appreciate your patience. For most of us, this is our first
experience with serious website work. Our merry band of do-gooders'
expertise generally lies in other areas (i.e. go-kart maintenance,
classical guitar, interpretive dance, international espionage,
etc.). Initially, we wanted to update twice a month (and that
is still a goal), but that is pretty damned tough for a volunteer-run
organization whose members have (multiple) real jobs and other
obligations.
For the
time being, we are working with a monthly zine format, updating
on the first of the month. This way, every time you write
your rent check, you can think, "Oh yeah! I should find out
what various internet people think of books!" You can then
pop on over, and we will tell you what we think about books.
Then you can send us an email that says, "Thanks, HBC! You
helped me find out about books which I enjoyed very much!
If any of you are ever in [insert name of your town here],
you should come over and I will bake cookies with you. Also,
tell Kyle I think he is cute and that all of my friends have
mad crushes on him."
In the
meantime, our bubbly little brains are brimming with ideas.
We are beginning to feature pro/con book reviews. This way,
you are able to read multiple opinions of books and decide
for yourself if it's something you want to check out. Plus,
according to internet bylaws, if you have the word "hipster"
in your name—despite the irony of said name—you
are required to have certain levels of snark and argument.
One of
the lessons we've learned in this exercise is that people
will talk mad shit on Dave Eggers and J.D. Salinger, but when
asked to write a "con" review of their books, no one volunteers.
We thought for sure that'd be the easiest way to launch our
pro/con reviews. We stand corrected (and slightly befuddled).
As we
grow and mature as a website, we sincerely appreciate your
continued visitation and feedback. The positive emails, phone
calls, and late-night "show up at your apartment" visits are
really encouraging. We remain excited to share with you. Every
time we see a bulletin on MySpace about us, or a LiveJournal
post, or a Facebook note, or we get linked from message boards,
or see our name pop up in an article in a blog/magazine/newspaper,
we get your little rush of love and support. Please, if you
like what we do, let us know, and tell a friend. If anything
we write here makes you laugh, turns you on to a book you
later enjoyed, or just allowed you some respite from a boring
afternoon at work, we're glad to keep working at it.
If you're
one of those people who don't read very much but visited the
site at someone's pleading, and you had that flash-thought
of "Man…I should really read more," please pay attention to
that. Read that book you've been meaning to read. Read it,
and then talk about it with someone you love. If you want
to share, we encourage you to write a review and post it somewhere.
Write a review and mail it to us. We can't promise that we'll
use it, but at the very least we'd like to hear about the
book you enjoyed enough to review. In fact, as people submit
their articles, we find ourselves thinking, "Hm. I kind of
want to read that now." Since sharing books you like in order
to turn other people on to them is our mission, I'd call that
a success.
No matter
how hard and time-consuming this little venture is, it's a
blast to see where it goes. As long as you keep coming back,
we'll keep sharing with you.
Feelin'
a little touchy-feely-huggy today,
Kyle
Olson
(April,
2007)
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