Our first anniversary

Orange Blossom Ordinary is officially one year old. We posted our first three reviews last year on July 30, 2024. Since then, we’ve managed to have posts almost every Tuesday and Thursday, excepting our vacations. One year in, we are still excited. Though we are far from entering our majority, we are perhaps emerging from our infancy.

An enterprise like Orange Blossom Ordinary runs on enthusiasm. No one is paid. No one is charged for reading what we post. We thrive on the goodwill of publishers, who send us review copies, sometimes even advanced review copies. People are so generous with us. We are blessed by authors willing to email and talk with us and endure recorded Zooms. Our reviewers are earnest and willing to endure editing. It all works because the publishers, the people who write for us, and the people who read us are all excited about books.

What’s happened has exceeded any expectations we might have had. We’ve done interviews with major authors, like Wright Thompson, Richard Overy, and Robert Darnton. We’ve talked to podcasters and poets. We had a series of reviews of Booker-shortlisted books. We read through all of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot with several people and we’re about to start Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse. We now have a whole page for Floridiana. Unbelievably, people look at our website every single day.  

How should you celebrate the one-year anniversary of a review of books? You could, of course, indulge in champagne. Ideally, you’d open it with a champagne saber. Perhaps a letter-opener would be more poetic? You could crack open a new book, (but not its spine). You could indulge in the scent of lignin from an old book. You could sharpen a pencil and then put it to paper. You could make a paper airplane. The last is not especially celebratory, but it sounds fun.

We don’t exactly know the best way to celebrate the anniversary of a review. But we do know that in the next year, we plan to keep reading and reviewing books. We plan to talk to more authors. We will try some more new things. We will continue to center books and ideas and attempt to live with “one foot in Florida, one foot in the life of the mind.” We would love it if you would keep reading.

—Elizabeth Stice