Sunday Snippets : 7 blogs that have become books

Ok, I was looking for this great blog I saw months ago about a couple of bicyclists for my TT Thursday post but couldn’t find it (obviously because there is no Thursday post although I am losing weight again, yippee!! )

However, I found some great blogs that had become books so I thought I’d share them with you. Plus this way if I go looking for the book in a few months from now, I’ll be able to find it.  My blog is becoming my memory reservoir. (Affiliate disclosure at bottom of post)

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen	One of my favorite blogs was made into Julie and Julia. I haven’t actually read the book and the blog was taken offline. However, the Wayback Machine have saved some of the Julie/Julia Project blog posts from August to November 2002 if you’d like to read a few.  It’s a funny witty blog about a young woman learning to cook from Julia’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The project to cook more than 500 recipes took one year.  The blog became a book (Julie & Julia, my year of cooking dangerously) and eventually a movie Julie & Julia starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep.  The movie is still popular making the top 50 movies on Netflix in May 2019 which is awesome considering it came out in 2009. I love her cooking journey but my favorite post is the one post she writes about her cat on October 3rd, 2002. She rhapsodies about her gray cat Cooper who has found a way to sneak into the ceiling, and then comes down to sleep in bed with them smelling of ratshit and insulation.  Totally made me laugh. As does her misadventures with cooking.
PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives	PostSecret published PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. This blog is extraordinary.  People send in their secrets on a postcard. It is sweet, sad, tragic and everything.
The Happiness Project, Tenth Anniversary Edition: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun	Another blog that started as a one-year project is the The Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin’s pursuit of happiness created a two-year bestseller and then other books have followed. It’s even spawned Happiness Projects groups where people discuss their own happiness projects. Her blog continues to this day. She has articles about happiness and also interviews other people on the topic. Lately she’s added podcasts to the mix.
Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage	Orangette started her food blog as a grad student in France with “It’s awfully quiet in here. If you’re there, dear reader, welcome to the beginning. That’s right, Molly’s blogging!” on July 30, 2004. She promises to go through some cookbooks and finishes the post with “Are you in Seattle? How does chocolate sound to you? How about rustic-ish French tartes, cakes, clafoutis, and such? I am the woman for you. I bake, you eat. I eat too, of course, but there’s only so much one girl can do on her lonesome. Sign-ups are now open. And there it is! We’re off!” That start eventually evolved into two books: A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table and Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage. The second is a memoir about a restaurant she and her husband started whom she met through her blog when he became a fan.
Humans of New York : Stories	Photographer Brandon Stanton started a photography blog and facebook page in the summer of 2010 taking photographs of people in New York City, Humans of New York. One of my favorite books is the 1974 Stud Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do where people talked abut their job and in doing so revealed themselves. Stanton does the same thing, featuring stories where the people talk about themselves.  It’s a pretty awesome blog.  In 2013, the blog became a bestseller, Humans of New York : Stories. (Not to be confused with few other books that popped up when I looked at his but I thought would be fun too: Shop Cats of New York, Felines of New York: A Glimpse Into the Lives of New York’s Feline Inhabitants and Canines of New York . )
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things	The Bloggess, Jenny Lawson, has an irreverent sense of humor about her troubles in her blog which has morphed into two books. Her first book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, was about her functional dysfunctional family growing up.  Her second book, Furiously Happy, is about her own struggles.  She told Nora Krug in a Washington Post article, “This book is about my battle with mental illness, but, more importantly, it’s about celebrating the battles we win against life and b.s. and sometimes our very brains” and explains her title with “I was so tired of being sad and feeling hopeless that I went to my next emotion, and that was anger. I was mad that life had thrown so much crap at me all at once, so I decided to be furiously happy. Vehemently joyous. To do everything I could when I was out of a depression to enjoy life, even if it was just from pure spite at the universe.”
Herding Cats: A Sarah’s Scribbles Collection	With a book title like Herding Cats, I became instantly curious about Sarah’s Scribbles. She initially started but has moved over to posting on Patreon which is a blogging platform that allows people to become patrons by donating one-time or monthly to support artists, videographers and others. She has this cat that makes a frequent appearance.  Like recently the cat squishes it’s head into a glass to lap water while Sarah points to the wide open cat water bowl on the floor.  Cracked me up.  Marmalade used to do that.
1000 Journals Project	This one I’m cheating. Okay call it a bonus. The 1000 Journal project isn’t really a blog although it does have a webpage . I had to include it because it’s an awesome book. I saw it recently at my friend’s house and I loved looking through it. It’s also a great book to leave in your bathroom (for those of you who hate just sitting like me) because you can open it randomly to any page. Brian Singer took 1000 journals and left them everywhere telling people to write, draw or whatever inside them. The books traveled randomly around the world , many disappeared but some eventually made their way back home filled with wonderfully creative pages by complete strangers. Singer gathered the pages into a book. Your library should have it. Check it out. So awesome.

 

A few others worth noting (the title of Crazy Aunt Purl’s book title totally cracked me up):

Niamh’s Eat like a Girl published Comfort and Spice.

Pioneer Woman published The Pioneer Woman : The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels–a Love Story as well as spawning a whole slew of cookbooks along with her cooking show.

Steady Mom published Introverted Mom: Your Guide to More Calm, Less Guilt, and Quiet Joy

Crazy Aunt Purl published Crazy Aunt Purl’s Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split

 

And that’s it for today.  Do you know of other cool blogs that have become books or even movies?

 

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