Hey lauren, sorry if I am being bit harsh on your, but you seem to be very greedy and not at all helping your visitors to read the content. I will start now
Things I like on your blog:
1. Your blog title: It has 6,600 searches globally giving you a fair change to be #2 (atleast for now), coz #1 ranking for this keyword belongs to http://readmorebooks.com which have tons of backlinks.
2. You have tremendous writing skills, I have read one of your post and trust me I am interested to read more but you write short 4 lines post.
3. You have adsense activated on your blog, trust me you can optimize it in better way than ever.
that's it.
Things Google/Visitors don't like about any blog:
1. **Important** Ads Ads Ads, no visitor likes ads my friend, we have a saying in affiliate marking world "create content, content can give you visitors, if you have visitors then you can have advertisers, if you have advertisers then you can make money. REMOVE ALL ADS
2. You are blogging since 2010 but didn't achieved any rank, you are working hard but there is no backlinks I see for your blog, I don't know whether you are receiving traffic or not. I will help you to optimize it.
3. Remove navBar as soon as possible, it still shows you are a beginner and don't know anything about blogging. Let me know if you need help.
4. use continue reading/read more widget.
5. Remove all blog directory badges from your blog.
6. Change the theme, it does not looks good, If you need my theme please let me know, I will optimize it for you (http://downloadfreeseotool.com).
7. Leave about me page remove all the pages, your blog takes almost 15sec to load, nobody have that much patience, remove every unnecessary thing and improve blog loading.
8. All social buttons should be in one widget
that' s it for you, let me know if you need any more help.