BBAW: First Treasure

It is Book Blogger Appreciation Week (also known as BBAW)!! Despite knowing it is coming for at least a couple of months, it still seems to have snuck up on me and I am not as prepared as I would have liked to have been!

I am very excited that Historical Tapestry is shortlisted in Best Historical Fiction blog, and that is going to be a huge highlight of this week. We are up against very worthy opponents.

To be honest, I am not sure that I am going to be posting on the suggested themes every day this week, but we will see how we go time wise. As I mentioned yesterday I am pretty much behind on everything these days. I could do with having a week off from work just so that I can blog! Not going to happen so just have to keep up as best I can.

The first theme for this week is one that I do want to do though:

We invite you to share with us about a great new book blog you’ve discovered since BBAW last year!  If you are new to BBAW or book blogging, share with us the very first book blog you discovered.  Tell us why this blog rocks your socks off and why you keep going back for more.

Last year I spotlighted an Aussie blog, and I want to continue with that this year. I have actually found out about quite a few Australian blogs over this year, due mainly to the Australian Book Blogger Directory (yet another project I am woefully behind on), but Desert Book Chick was one that I found out about before then. Amanda was one of my sounding boards when I was thinking about putting it together and she was very supportive.

What are the things I enjoy about Amanda's blog - she reads across a variety of genres, she's not afraid to say what she thinks, and she is willing to try new things.

Whilst we share the first of those qualities listed, Amanda is much more forthright than I am when it comes to sharing opinions (or maybe it is just that she gets around to actually writing the posts whereas I just think about writing those types of posts). I don't necessarily always agree with what Amanda has to say (for example, I think we have called a truce on the issue of Blogger commenting systems!) but she does get me to think about those issues.

Over the last couple of months, Amanda has started a newsletter, and a podcast(something that is marginally less likely to be something that I would do than a vlog, but only marginally). Her aims for her blog include to be a blogger resource, and so since starting her book blog back in January, there have been explorations of writing reviews, and promotions, and her themes have included reading the classics and more recently a theme called Men Don't Read?

As I mentioned, I don't necessarily always agree with what Amanda has to say, but I do always look forward to her new posts to see what she has come up with next, and she does quite often get me thinking! She is someone who blogs with passion, and I think that should be key for all of us in order to have the best blogs that we can.

I know that Amanda had a rough blogging week last week, so I just wanted to give a shout out to her and say I am glad that you are sticking around. My blogging world wouldn't be the same without you in it!