An Introduction to Literary Blogs
Two posts in one day? I guess this shows that I've got the blogging bug, especially since my readership (or should I say reader) is so limited.
But I've just been doing research on literary blogs, so I thought I'd post some information here.
Readers already know that there are blogs about just about everything, so it's hardly surprising that the genre of literary blogs exists. Literary blogs tend to be a mix of publishing industry and book talk, reviews, personal musings, and whatever else the blogger wants to write about that day.
Some well-known literary blogs are BookSlut (www.bookslut.com), Slightly Foxed (www.foxedquarterly.com), and The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/).
BookSlut and The Elegant Variation are well enough known that they were discussed on an NPR report on how blogging is influencing the publishing industry.
I'm writing from the northwest--Corvallis, OR to be specific--so I thought I'd mention a northwest site: MoorishGirl, which comes out of Portland Oregon (moorishgirl.com). It has many helpful links, including a list of literary blogs.
The author of MoorishGirl participates in another new literary blog site, The Litblog co-op (lbc.typepad.com/blog/. This coop includes members who have their own literary blogs. The group has agreed to "meet" four times a year to select "a book from obscurity, an overlooked literary gem" that they would bring to the public's attention, both on their own blogs and on the co-op blog.
There's certainly lots going on out there! Surely this can only help the future of literature and of publishing.
posted by Lisa Ede @ 1:33 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
It is I--your readership! I will now read wht you have posted today.
Hope
Hi, Lisa. One reader is a readership. I plodded along with only one reader for weeks and now I have um, well, on some days, none. But you are a better writer, so things will pick up here.
As to Slightly Foxed, I read about it, I believe, in the British conservative periodical, The Salisbury Review. I sent them my banking info, as they won’t take American checks (very backward on their part), but they never received it so I have never seen a copy. I love literary periodicals and subscribe to many, many, many and there is the problem with blogging. To wit, I spend so much writing entries for my blog and attempting to visit the blogs of those who visit it that my reading of literary periodicals has plummeted. Therefore, I am not sure how great blogging is in turns of increasing the numbers of cultivated people. I think it is increasing the number of writers and reducing hugely the amount of reading we are doing. I spend a good deal of time proofreading what I write, which is boring and keeps me from reading magazines, let alone books. This is true of other bloggers, unless they choose not to proofread.
Have you read Hugh Hewitt's book, Blog? I haven't, being too busy blogging. But he is a conservative and therefore, of course, intelligent.
Hope
Hi, Lisa. This item I found here:
http://www.librarystuff.net/
Do You Blog?
There is a very lenghtly (and well written) article over at the Washington Lawyer on legal blogs (blawgs). For librarians, check out the section on Blogs and Legal Research. A quote (one of many good ones):
"Stephanie Tai says her blog provides the kind of shortcut that helps law students, law reviews, and attorneys know what is going on in the journals and how they can take advantage of it, whether they’re looking to publish an article or find one.
“I’ve been teaching a class for law review editors at the Georgetown University Law Center, and I thought this would be a useful resource, both for journals to know what kind of things that other journals are publishing and also for authors to know which journals are running late on their publication schedule,” says Tai." (link via ambivalent imbroglio)
permalink | Comments [0] | Feedster Post Search | Technorati Post Search |
It led me here:
http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/washington_lawyer/april_2005/blogs.cfm
Hope
Hi Hope,
One couldn't ask for a better reader(ship)than you!
Thanks for your thoughts about how maintaining a blog detracts from other reading time. Now that you mention it, I realize that I have spent less time reading such tradition print sources as _The New York Times Book Review_. Hmmm.
Today I did some research on personal online book review sites. There are certainly some odd ones out there. Here are two, in case anyone is interested:
The Brothers Judd www.brothersjudd.com/
Virtual Marginalia
www.papaya-palace.com/katbooks/?
The author of Virtual Marginalia explains that he started the book review part of his larger site because he reads books too quickly and can't remember them, so his site is as much about recording/reminding himself about what he's read as anything else.
And thanks for the info on the librarystuff site--looks interesting.
That is true.
I like the New York Review of Books except for all the liberal stuff in it. It is funny that it calls itself a review of books given that the books supposedly under review are hardly reviewed at all.
The author of Virtual Marginalia (again, is one an "author" of a blog?) is simply keeping a commonplace book. That was common in the 19th century and V. Woolf and E.M. Forster kept them:
http://www.mlwebb.com/oregon/stories/2002/01/19/commonplaceBook.html
Hope
Good point about the author (That doesn't seem quite the right term, but I can't think of another) of Virtual Marginalia. My sense, though, is that commonplace books were generally places where readers wrote exact (or verbatim) quotes from texts that they especially liked.
You also make a good point about the reviews in the New York Review of Books. As I've studied reviews, I've realized that they can take multiple forms and serve multiple purposes. This is especially true for long reviews that appear in venues like The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.
Very often their purpose is much broader than simply assessing a book. Reviews of biographies, for instance, often serve the dual purpose of providing a mini-biography of the person about whom the book is written. Ironically, reviews like this often substitute for many readers--like me--for reading the actual book.
Other reviews are really larger arguments about, say, the Cold War or the contemporary state of the arts.
Reviews that morph in these ways usually do evaluate the book in question, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses--but this is often subordinated to larger goals.
Hi, Lisa. That is a good point about commonplace books.
And I read once, I believe, that Thomas Hardy’s marginalia is as boring as his letters:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1068-1398459,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,473009,00.html
The New York Review of Books review mainly showcases what the author thinks about a subject and only very marginally deals with the books under review. That is less so of The New York Times Book Review, which has gotten pretty meager in the past ten years considering how much it costs.
I agree with you about reviews substituting for readings of biographies. This is supposedly a golden age of biography, by the way, fiction having lost its mass audience. It is amazing how the British write biographies of even very minor figures the counterparts of which here are regarded as better left unsung.
What is to argue about about the Cold War? We won, no thanks to the left.
Hope
Post a Comment
<< Home