Wrap your mind around this: I’m about to write a review of a book about blogs on a blog about books.

Whoa.

Ultimate Blogs, edited by Sarah Boxer, is an anthology of some of the web’s most popular and well-done blogs. I’m not really sure who the target market for this book is, though. Is it people who know nothing about blogs and therefore need an introduction to them? At times, the way Boxer interjects explanations for internet slang suggests that yes, maybe she is writing for the uninitiated. Or is she compiling various blog entries for blog-savvy readers who are just looking to expand their digital-reading arsenal?

The good news, I suppose, is that this book can serve either type of reader. I’m a fairly seasoned blog reader, and there were blogs in this book I’d never heard of and have now added to my daily rounds.

Boxer has taken care to present a diverse array of blogs: we’ve got some photography, some historical fiction, some comics, some fashion snark, some dreamy blank-verse poetry, some radical feminism*, some war dispatches, some politics, some linguistics*, some cosmology, some design ideas, and lots more. One nit I’d pick is that Boxer includes The Smoking Gun in the collection. I’m not sure I’d call TSG a blog (I’d call TSG a plain old website). To do so could certainly inspire conversations about what, exactly, the definition of “blog” is.

Of course, the downside to offering up so many diverse blogs in a book like this is that — if you are like most people — you are going to stumble upon a topic that is going to make your eyes glaze over. Perhaps you’re more patient than I am and will just power on through in an effort to more fully understand the nature of the all the amazing blogs that are out there. If so, I salute you. Your kind is rare in the fast-paced, info-clogged blogosphere.

I can’t help but wonder how many of these blog anthologies are going to come out each year, and how people will be expected to choose from among them to find the best collections and the best blogs. In my mind, there is no better way to find new blogs than to just keep on surfing and checking out the blogrolls of the blogs you really like. Just keep clicking. One built-in downside of publishing a blog anthology is its timeliness. Many of the entries in Boxer’s book are from 2006 and, while most of them don’t necessarily lose their luster because they are excellent examples of nearly timeless blogging, reading posts from 2005 and 2006 can make a reader feel a certain distance between him/herself and a blogger. One of the reasons blogging is so great is its immediacy. When you can read someone else’s musings in what is more or less real time, it makes you feel connected to that person, even if he or she has no idea you are out there reading.

So maybe this book is best used as a yearbook of sorts, a collection of some of the best posts from across the web in a certain span of time. And surely for the bloggers it’s gotta be pretty cool to have their digital brain droplets featured in a dead-tree edition of anything, right?

* These are two of my very favorite blogs, so I have to politely insist that you check them out.