Armchair BEA: Relationships

This post is part of my week-long participation in Armchair BEA 2011.





When I think about blogging relationships the first thing that comes to find is connecting with other bloggers. To me that’s the most exciting part about book blogging. That’s the whole reason why Armchair BEA works. We might not be in the same city (heck, we’re all over the world), but we can still connect and form relationships through our blogs. The whole reason I started my blog was to connect into the book blogging community. I had been following blogs for a long time, and I could see the camaraderie between bloggers. I love reading book reviews and discussion posts, and I wanted to be a bigger part of that. That’s why my favourite part of blogging is the community itself.

Most of us probably have friends or family members who enjoy reading, but no one quite gets the book addiction like a fellow book blogger. No one else would understand how EXCITING it is when your favourite author’s new release comes out or, even better, when you get to attend a certain signing or reading. Authors are like our rock stars, and we can freely admit that, because we know there are other people out there who understand.

I love getting comments on my posts so much, and I love seeing the same people return again and again. I think I’ll talk more about that tomorrow for the ‘Blogging About Blogging’ topic, but even those relationships that consist solely of comments can become special and important. Since I’ve been blogging I’ve been able to find so many new blogs to follow, and one of my favourite aspects of this is discovering fellow Canadian (especially Ontarian) book bloggers. I haven’t been able to meet any of them in person yet, but hopefully that might happen if I can attend some bookish events in Toronto this fall.

So how have I found all these awesome people? Various ways, I suppose. A lot of people I’ve followed after seeing them around Twitter. I also find blogs through participating in the ‘In My Mailbox’ meme, or even just by seeing people’s comments on another blog I follow. Of course giveaways are another way of finding blogs. It’s always awesome when you follow through a link for a giveaway and happen upon this ultra cool blog where the person has similar reading taste as you and posts lots of cool content.

I guess this post is more of a vague love letter to the blogging community than a post about a specific blogging relationship I have, but to me, the whole book blogging community is just amazing. It’s made up of such a huge variety of people from all over, yet we all have this common interest that we love. I don’t want to get all sappy (okay, I think I already have), but I think book bloggers are some pretty amazing people for the most part. It seems so rare to be able to “meet” such friendly and awesome people online, and I’m so glad I’m a part of it all.