A Note from Kim: This week is Book Blogger Appreciation Week, an amazing event that celebrates book blogging. My posts this week are going to be related to the daily discussion topic for BBAW. I’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week.
Today’s Topic: While the awards are a fun part of BBAW, they can never accurately represent the depth and breadth of diversity in the book blogging community. Today you are encouraged to highlight a couple of bloggers that have made book blogging a unique experience for you. They can be your mentors, a blogger that encouraged you to try a different kind of book, opened your eyes to a new issue, made you laugh when you needed it, or left the first comment you ever got on your blog. Stay positive and give back to the people who make the community work for you!
When I went to BEA this year, one of the things that struck me about the trip was how much blogging has brought me great friends that I would never have gotten to meet otherwise.
Some of these friendships seem a little more obvious than others, in the sense that if I met these bloggers randomly in real life it would be less strange to imagine us as friends.
My first night in New York for BEA, Jenny (Jenny’s Books) let me crash at her apartment because I’m inept at making travel plans — how generous, for someone who you’ve never met in person before. I shared a room at a hostel with with Anastasia (BirdBrain(ed) Book Blog) and Ash (English Major’s Junk Food), both twenty-something students (or recent graduates), much like me. I also spent a lot of time with Cass (Bonjour, Cass!) and Amy (Amy Reads), hatching plans to dominate the blogging world through a love of nonfiction. But we also talked about so many other things, I like to imagine that if we’d met some other way we’d still have become friends,
Edited to add: And of course there is Lu (Regular Rumination) — she’s also a young, hybrid student/blogger that I adore!
We’re all on the younger end of book blogging and have some different tastes in books, but we’ve connected. My point isn’t that we’re all exactly the same, more that if strangers saw any of those bloggers with me on the street, it wouldn’t seem like an odd match.
On the other hand, blogging has also brought me great friends from people that may not otherwise have come my way, of, if they did, might have missed my radar completely because they’re just different than me.
