The biggest of book-soaked thanks to A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook for the blogging honour of The One Lovely Blog Award.

He said: “Every once in a while a new commentator would leave very refreshing and thoughtful remarks in the blog. It’s almost like that revolutionary Apple computer commercial in 1984 in which this female athlete threw a hammer (or was it a discus) at this gigantic screen. Buried in Print is such a commentator.”

I am compelled to repeat this because for the first time (and, likely, last) in my bookish life, I feel like an athlete for a moment and, surely it doesn’t get better than this, a revolutionary athlete to boot.

With (athletic) rewards come (athletic) responsibilities, however. Recipients of The One Lovely Blog Award must:

  • Accept the award, and post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award and his/her blog link
  • Pass the award to 5 other blogs that you’ve newly discovered. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know that they have been chosen for this award.

What the following five blogs have in common is their authors’ passion for books and reading. I’ve included tasters from each below, something that spoke of a bookishness-in-extreme, a quality I look for in both people and places.

Brown Girl Speaks

  • “…I read hardcore. I don’t know what that means, I just like saying it.”
    (This made me giggle. I don’t giggle often. Although I’ve giggled more often since I got my award for being so athletic.)
  • “Her characterizations are not as fully realized as I would have liked for other characters besides Lizzie, but ultimately this is Lizzie’s story.”
    (Said about Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Wench and I like it because her opinion is simultaneously uttered alongside a space for other opinions: call it fence-sitting, call it Canadian, whatever…I love this open-minded approach to reading.)

Chasing Bawa

  • “Sometimes I make a silent list of what I’m going to read in the next few months but I’m so easily sidetracked…”
  • “I went to the library to return a book and came back with two more…”
    (Sometimes it’s the simple sentences that catch me: these are two beginnings to Chasing Bawa’s posts and I love the raw bookishness, declared at the outset, unapologetically.)

The Heroine’s Bookshelf

  • “What is it about heroines?  Why do they exert such a seductive pull, calling me away from the dishes and the to-do list?”
  • “wwlmad (what would louisa may alcott do?)”
    (And sometimes it’s the questions that catch me, as do those asked on The Heroine’s Bookshelf, where it’s okay, even encouraged, to reveal one’s inner nerdiness…hey, she said ‘nerd’ first.)

Olduvai Reads

  • Said about Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: “This review hardly does justice to this book but I do know that it would be such a shame to pass this book by.”
  • Said about “Nicholson Baker’s novel: “So The Anthologist is a book about poetry. Then again it’s not really either. Ok, let me start over.”
    (One of the most appealing things for me about Olduvai Reads’ blog is the sense that, when it comes to bookchat, it’s simultaneously important to ‘get it right’ even though sometimes it’s impossible to ‘get it right’, a reminder that the simple act of bookchatting sometimes makes things ‘right’.)

The Writer’s Pet

  • “Excuse the bad pun in the headline (and the one coming up), but I devoured Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games…”
  • Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott made me cry, which I loved (I didn’t love being on the tube while I cried, because I didn’t want to wipe away my tears and get tube cooties, but c’est la vie).”
    (The snippets I’ve chosen here might reveal more about me than the blog: I love puns and I hate tube cooties. They both make me giggle…well, not the cooties themselves, which are just gross, obviously, but simply thinking the word ‘cooties’.)