As today is the first day of BBAW, I thought I’d take a minute to participate in the first topic:

First Treasure — 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.

I started Just Book Reading a few weeks before BBAW last year, but thanks to that lovely week, I managed to find several new blogs to read and some great resources to help me out.  I have a few favorites that I started reading before I decided to start my own blog and those are the few I’m going to highlight here.

I found Devourer of Books one day when I was cruising around looking for some reviews, and when I was done reading, had a massive number of books to add to my list.  Jen does a great job of writing incredibly concise reviews and I always know at the end of the review if the book is for me or not.

I love historical fiction and the Medieval Bookworm was a natural fit for me. Meghan’s writing is wonderful and she captures the essence of the book so well.  Even if it’s a book that isn’t for me, I still enjoy reading her reviews.

At Home With Books features books that I like to read and I think that’s the reason I love reading Alyce’s reviews.  Each time I stop by I always find something to add to my list.

Marg at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader is always reading something interesting and I have to say that I love the little snippets about Australian life that she infused her blog with.

Over the last year, I’ve added a lot of blogs to my regular must read list including: The Literary Omnivore, The Crowded Leaf, Jenny’s Books, alita.reads, A Striped Armchair, Puss Reboots, and…I am going to stop there or I will go on listing everything I read and boring you all.

I thought I would wrap up by sharing a funny thing about the name of my blog.  When I decided to stake my blog claim I picked the name — Just a Book Reader — which I was very happy with.  It left me a bit of anonymity and I felt it described me pretty well.  After all, I was just a book reader…well, one with lots of opinions but one just the same.  A day later, and a Google search later, it turns out that there was another blog out there with that name.  It was defunct but I still felt weird about it so I shortened the name to Just Book Reading because it was close to the original name and easy enough to change without jumping through too many hoops.  And, thus, that is how I became Just Book Reading.  What I learned was to get my Google fu on before setting my heart on a name without a more thorough search.  Will not happen again.  So there you have it, true confessions.

Happy BBAW!