BBAW: Book recommendations

 

Today's topic for Book Blogger Appreciation Week is one I think of often, particularly as I look at my overloaded TBR shelves: "What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger?"

Anyone who visits my blog knows that I can be a slightly obsessive reader. Once I discover an author I love, I tend to collect all of her books that I can get my hands on. Fellow bloggers have introduced me to several of my new obsessions favorites. I had not come across Jo Walton's books before I read Jenny's reviews of her "Small Change" series on Shelf Love, which immediately added them to my reading list (along with many others she and Teresa have read). I think it was Claire of The Captive Reader who introduced me to Dorothy Canfield's The Home-Maker, though it's a favorite with many of my favorite bloggers and readers. I've been collecting Canfield's novels (and memoirs and letters and...) ever since. I believe I first read about Patricia Wentworth on Katrina's Pining for the West - and finally got clear in my mind the (huge) difference between Patricia Wentworth and Patricia Highsmith. I'm still tracking all of her many Miss Silver books down. I have an entire shelf of "Where Jane led me" books, thanks to Jane of Beyond Eden Rock, starting with Margaret Kennedy (Lucy Carmichael is superb) and Margery Sharp. I owe my introduction to Persephone Books to my fellow bloggers as well. I know I'll be discovering still more new authors and books to love inside those grey spines (and regularly blowing my book allowance on overseas shipping).

In addition to new authors, bloggers have re-introduced me to authors that I had read before but not really appreciated, or whose books I had read so long ago that I'd almost forgotten them. Thomas of Hogglestock hosted a reading week for Barbara Pym's novels that gave me a new appreciation for books I'd dismissed years ago. Anbolyn of Gudrun's Tights reminded me how good Mary Stewart's suspense novels can be. I had read Elizabeth von Arnim's Enchanted April years ago, but it was reading reviews of her other books on my favorite blogs that led me to re-read it with a new appreciation, and then to look for her many other excellent books. The same thing has just happened with Willa Cather. It was reading reviews by Anbolyn and Karen of Books and Chocolate that finally led me to read Death Comes for the Archbishop - and to start collecting Cather's other books. And while I have long been a keen Trollopian, I have loved reading Trollope's books with Audrey of Books as Food and JoAnn of Lakeside Musing, among others - "Trolloping with friends," as we like to call it.

Fellow bloggers have inspired and challenged me to read more diversely, through events like Aarti's Diversiverse, on Book Lust, and also through their own commitments, like Reading the End's Jenny.

Thanks to my fellow bloggers, I know that I'll never run out of great books to read - and my TBR shelves will never be empty!