Congrats to The Sunday Salon for winning “Best Meme” in the BBAW Awards this past week – that makes all of us Saloners winners too!
Another Book Blogger Appreciation Week has come to an end, and while it was indeed “a treasure chest of infinite books and infinite blogs,” it unfortunately lacked infinite time to experience them all! I hope to catch up on the posts I missed by the end of this weekend, and I apologize in advance if I miss yours! As always, thanks to Amy and the BBAW team for a great event (and for inviting me to participate in the wrap-up conversation on a special Friday-night edition of That’s How I Blog! You can stream it or download the podcast from that link.). And if you haven’t weighed in on the BBAW Post-Event Survey, don’t forget to do that!
Because I was keeping tabs on the events for my daily recaps at She Writes, I think I have a good feel for the big news of the week, but I’m sure I missed a lot of things bubbling underneath. Losing Twitter access from my office as of Wednesday didn’t help matters – bad timing, but since I don’t think that’s coming back, I suppose I’ll have to adapt. (It’s like they think Twitter impairs work productivity or something. What’s that about?)
However, I didn’t completely miss out on doing some damage to my feed reader, in accordance with BBAW tradition. Meet some of the new additions:
Added on Day 1, via posts about “First Treasures” (book blogs discovered during the past year):
The Avid Reader’s Musings
the little reader
Roof Beam Reader
Evening All Afternoon
Jenny’s Books
My Porch
Added on Day 2 (and 3, because I fell behind in my reading), via “New Treasures” (BBAW Interview Swap)
There were some great guest posts on the BBAW blog itself, too. One of my favorites was The Classics Debate between Michelle of That’s What She Read (pro) and Danielle of There’s a Book (con). For the most part, and at least for now, I’m on Danielle’s side; I would have been anyway, but her statement that “(I)t could just be that Wuthering Heights finally did me in” did me in. For the record – which I think is already on the record here somewhere – I despise Wuthering Heights, which I’ve read twice. I gave it a second chance because so many people do love it, and didn’t like it any better the second time. It’s been influential, though – any book whose male protagonist reminds me of Heathcliff has a distinct disadvantage to overcome in winning my affections.
Aside from that, I don’t find the language of classics complicated, exactly, but it does tend to be denser and take more time and concentration for me to work through. Granted, many of these books were written when people HAD that time…and at this stage of my life, I don’t feel that I do. I’m not ruling them out entirely, but just not right now. However, since Michelle told me that a book just has to be more than 25 years old to be considered a “classic,” it may be much easier than I thought it would be to work them into my reading. (My son turned 26 in July – is he a classic now too?)
Another of my favorite posts of this week had nothing to do with a particular BBAW theme; however, Care‘s reflections on life before and after book blogging were all about the book-blogger appreciation!
The book-blog world will probably quiet down for a few days as we all recover and try to catch up with some of the books we’ve neglected during the past week…or maybe that’s just me. I am bound and determined to finish The Lonely Polygamist and get a review of it posted next week (for the record, I’ve liked it so far and am closing in on the end, but it’s long)! I received it as an ARC, but it’s been out since…April. Oops.
My short-term reading goals are to deplete my ARC stack – which, fortunately, is relatively small right now – and think about which books to set aside for the 24-Hour Readathon on October 9. And while I have no shortage of neglected non-ARC review books, I’m somewhat inclined to continue neglecting them and read my own books for the rest of the year. I may even tackle one or two of the books my husband’s been trying to get me to read ever since he did – those are even more neglected than the non-ARC review books!
Did you participate in BBAW, and did you have fun with it? What will you be reading now that it’s over?