Book Blogger Appreciation Week has started! If you are a book blogger, even if you didn’t nominate yourself for any awards, you can participate in giveaways and in the memes. The theme this year is A Treasure Chest of Infinite Books and Infinite Blogs, and every day there is a topic related to this theme.
Monday’s topic is First Treasure:
For those of you who participated in BBAW last year, what’s a great new book blog you’ve discovered since last year’s BBAW?
For those you new to BBAW, what was the first book blog you discovered?
While I’ve known about BBAW and mentioned it in this blog, I don’t think I really participated in it except to vote. So I guess I’m new to BBAW. The first blog I discovered.. um.. I recall stumbling upon someone’s website that was specifically about speculative fiction written by women. It was luna-cat.net. I lurved this website! I think that was back in the day (in 2002 or something) when I mostly relied on Amazon for reviews, and I wanted to find out about books in SF written by women. This website isn’t technically a blog though, but I did like the way she categorized the books: Strange Worlds, Warrior Women & Assassins, Women of Magic & Power, to name a few. This website hasn’t been updated in a while, but it’s still there and I still look at it from time to time.
The first blog I stumbled onto was actually Romantic SF & Fantasy Novels. This was a blog/website where a group of readers in a discussion board read books and wrote quick reviews and either recommended or discommended them. One of the readers (Preeti) compiled the reviews and put it up on a website. Sadly this blog hasn’t been updated in a LONG time, although Preeti is on twitter now (I got a serious thrill when I found her there *stalker big fan aura*). I still pay attention to Preeti’s recs via twitter. I was attracted to this blog because there were a lot of reviews of books by SF female authors, but I stayed because I really trusted their reviews and I really liked that there were recommends/discommends on one book from multiple people. Even now I sometimes check if an older book was reviewed over there (their review page has who recommends and who discommends all in one page! It’s extremely handy).
I think after that I meandered over to romance blogs (Dear Author was a big one), and then I was reading a few urban fantasy blogs, and then a bunch of YA ones started showing up on my radar. Now I have 243 subscriptions on my google reader (“Since April 20, 2007 you have read a total of 62,095 items”) and then a bunch of blogs on livejournal I read via my friends page. 😀
specficromantic 
I love that my google reader is nice and plump. I remember the days when it was so quiet and I longed for things to read!
Yeah.. I think there were times I’d refresh and *nothing* new! Now I have trouble keeping up.
I love hearing about the “early days” for other bloggers. It’s always so fascinating the different paths we took to get where we are.
And that’s, um, a lot of items read! 🙂
The “early days” seem so lonely compared to now, ha. I just peered around via google back then. Now I find things through links from other blogs. More hopping rather than searching these days.
Yes, it’s a LOT, I think google must be generously counting things I marked as read.
I’ve just stumbled across your blog while perusing the BBAW links and I’m so glad I did. I hope you’re having a great week so far! 🙂
Thank you, I hope you keep stopping by. I follow you on goodreads so I know your blog. 😀
This BBAW is hugely impacting my reader I also love reading about the early days and I am discovering some great blogs
There are so many blogs to read now. It’s pretty cool, although I feel like I want to have more time to keep up with them all. As it is I feel like I don’t comment on enough.
I should take note of that SF and Fantasy link that you mentioned. I have a feeling I’ll find a couple of goodies in there. Like you, I used to check Amazon a lot before I discovered book blogs and Goodreads. I enjoy browsing through book blogs more though because you get to know the person behind the blog. 🙂
Oh you will find that it is a treasure. I mean, I was just looking in their reviews page and noticed that a LOT of names were on the recommend list for Juliet Marillier books. They covered a lot in genres that I like to read.
When there was just Amazon, I would spend stretches up to 7 hours long reading reviews and adding books to my wishlist. I think my wishlist there is in the 30 page range. I miss using that to stay organized but I haven’t added much there since I started reading blogs (I’ve just been labeling posts on google reader as “book to read”, “maybe”, “book to skip” etc).