BBAW: First Treasures

Welcome to Book Blogger Appreciation Week! This will be my second time participating in that crazy week of blogging, blogging about blogs, visiting blogs, and discovering new blogs. Each day has a theme and Monday's is First Treasures.

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?

Well, for starters, I'm still "hanging out" with all original 2666 gang, including Sarah, Claire, Gavin, Richard, Frances, Emily, and Lu. Did that read-along really begin way back in May 2009? We should've celebrated our one-year anniversary months ago!

But onto new blogs! Much as I enjoy old favorites, I have also discovered several new-to-me book blogs since September 2009. They are:

Amy Reads

Amy's tastes are very eclectic, but what I find most interesting are many of the books she reads on feminism and gender studies. (In fact, I think we've been reading the same social justice blogs without even knowing it.) Her fiction choices reflect a commitment to diversity and multiculturalism and I enjoyed her recent reviews on African literature.

Awful Library Books

This one was actually introduced to me by last year's BBAW. I believe it was nominated for the humor category? (I think it won, too.) Anyway, Awful Library Books is a concept blog run by two librarians, Mary and Holly, who post about books to be weeded from their collections. (You can also submit your own.) This means the book has become outdated, archaic, or irrelevant, or perhaps it was never useful in the first place. In many instances, it suffers (hilariously) from an acute case of Values Dissonance. Such books must be promptly discarded, or possibly sold on eBay. Libraries have limited space, which means that hanging onto such "treasures" is a waste of resources and a disservice to the public at large. But oh teh lulz!

Iris on Books

Iris is a student in the Netherlands whose popular, well-established blog is a great resource for contemporary world literature. Beyond that, she has a broad range, moving easily from Dante to YA to memoirs to graphic novels.

Wuthering Expectations

Amateur Reader's blog covers a lot of lesser-known works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as poetry and fiction in translation. His posts are both highly intelligent and highly readable, a perfect blend of conversational style and scholarly insight.