Let's Celebrate Book Bloggers!

BBAW is here for another year! That means that I will get to learn about loads of other book bloggers which I will definitely need to add to my already bulging feed reader! And it means that the blogs I already read will be doing lots of posts, and lots of giveaways, which will mean a bulging feed reader! From that summary, you would be mistaken for thinking that BBAW only means an overflowing, bulging feed reader, but it really does mean a lot more than that!

Throughout the week there are a series of suggested themes for posting about. I will probably do them all, but I am not committing to doing that 100% at this point in time, especially in view of the fact that I finish up at my job on Friday and I have interstate visitors.

The idea for today is to spotlight those blogs that didn't make it on the shortlists for the BBAW Awards. There are so many great blogs out there and trying to narrow the list down was painful, even just to choosing which genre to focus on! Romance? Historical Fiction? General reviews?

In the end, in honour of my shortlisting in the Best Romance Blog, I decided to focus on a romance blog and then further narrowed it down to a romance blog that has an Australian flavour - Book Thingo, whose tag line is 'Reading (mostly) romance books down under'





Book Thingo is a blog that was started just under a year ago. The three main contributors are Kat, Wandergurl and Decadence and the blog is just going from strength to strength. Originally I found the blog because I used to read Kat's personal blog, so when she announced the creation of Book Thingo I was already on board.

I really like that Book Thingo has a definite Aussie flavour, but not only limited to Aussie books, authors or our publishing industry. These ladies know romance, and their reviews are not only informative, but they are comprehensive, fun and very easy to read. Their latest blog post title is 'Ten Books I SWEAR I will finish by the end of the year', a sentiment I am sure many readers will recognise! I sure do!

I often add recommendations to my TBR list due to the reviews that I have seen from there. At the moment I have a book out from the library called Disco Boy by Dominic Knight. I haven't read it yet but I would never have even looked at it without having read the Book Thingo review. A romance written from a male point of view, by an Australian man who is a comedian for his day job - I wouldn't have thought so, but Kat's review convinced me that not only should I give it a go, but that it would be highly likely that I would really enjoy it! I will be reading this book in the next three weeks or so, so we will see!

Currently Book Thingo is hosting the Books Alive Reading Challenge. Books Alive is an Australian government and book industry initiative that tries to encourage more Aussies to buy and read more books - always a worthy cause! Every year they issue a booklet of recommended reads and there are several challenge levels, one of which is to encourage you to read some of the titles chosen. I am doing the more general challenge of reading some books of my own choice!

I was lucky enough to meet the gorgeous Kat earlier this year at ARRC, and I can't wait to catch up with her again at some point in the future! (She's the pretty one on the left) The gala dinner was just winding up when suddenly we realised that we hadn't had a photo taken! Normally I am not really all that keen on having photo's taken, but I had obviously had enough wine by that time to not mind! LOL!