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Top 100 blogs
The Times of London has put up a list of the one hundred best in what reporter Bryan Appleyard calls the “blogscape” (a better word than “blogosphere,” he rightly says). In the category of Words, seven are named:
• Patrick Kurp’s Anecdotal Evidence. If Kurp is not the dean he is the best of us book bloggers.
• Frank Wilson’s Books, Inq.—The Epilogue. Appleyard characterizes it as a “hub” where “many bloglines intersect.”
• James Wolcott’s blog at Vanity Fair. The prose is “high-dandy,” as Appleyard calls it.
• Jessa Crispin’s Blog of a Bookslut. The blog is not “from several hands,” as Appleyard the paper has it (he they may be thinking of the monthly web magazine). Crispin is reliably amusing from a reliably “hip” perspective.
• Joseph Sullivan’s Book Design Review. Lots of jacket art—more jacket art than book design, really—with critical comments interspersed.
• The Orwell Diaries. Published by the Orwell Prize, the blog follows the diary, day by day, as Orwell wrote it: “Each diary entry is published on the blog exactly seventy years after it was originally written by Orwell, beginning in 1938. . . .”
• And, finally, this self-same Commonplace Blog.
The Times includes Nigeness under the category of Original Thinkers, but Nige thinks originally in strikingly original words. He is more literary than philosophical, but should be read no matter what category he belongs to.
5 comments:
Not me who got the Crispin blog wrong. That list was compiled by many hands.
Others do post now and then at Bookslut, sometimes taking over from Ms Crispin for brief or extended periods when she's off doing something or other; for recent examples see postings by John Zuarino and Jason B. Jones.
Whaaat? The Orwell Diaries made their top seven literary blogs? The majority of the site's entries have consisted of terse descriptions of the weather or, even worse, how many eggs the hens laid that day (standard entry, in its entirety: "Two eggs."). No doubt Orwell was a literary giant, but the publishing of his journal as a blog seems to play right into the cognoscenti's claims that blogs are nothing more than irrelevant trifles. I was expecting Orwell's deep and thoughful reflections on life and the world, and instead all I got was the Farmer's Almanac.
It's a pity the Diary of a Nobody blog wasn't on the list. An unfailing joy.
The Diary of a Nobody blog is similar to the Orwell Diaries. Written by George Grossmith and originally serialised in Punch (1888–89), it publishes the entries on the day they were first written.
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