Author Archive
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.
Lately I’ve not had a lot of time to devote to reading lengthy novels that require the full attention span of a higher mammal as opposed to, oh, say, that of a gnat. So I’ve busied myself reading books that can be digested in bits and pieces over the course of several weeks. Both just happen to be guides to strange and foreign lands — one to the land of conscientious environmentalism and the other to the land of the male brain.
Let’s just say that one of these guides will have you raring to go, and the other is going to make you want to chuck things (like, books about the warring sexes) out the window of a moving vehicle.
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Everybody (with the exception of you, you, and maybe you) has a MySpace page these days. Or at least a Facebook account. Or LinkedIn profile. And chances are, you might be a little bored. E-stalking old classmates and exes can really only take you to a certain level of web nirvana, after all.
So if you’re looking for new pixelated playgrounds on which to play, have I got some sites for you.
• First up is GoodReads. I just jumped on this bandwagon yesterday, so I’m still getting acquainted with the interface. It seems simple enough. You create an account and add books to your virtual shelves, designate each book as read, to-be-read, or currently being read, and then assign each book a star rating. You add friends a la other social networking sites, and you can look at their shelves and compare books and ratings and get recommendations for your next read. Bonus: There’s a friend importer that automatically hooks you up with contacts from your e-mail (if your client supports it; I use Gmail, but the feature also works with Hotmail, AOL Mail, and Yahoo! Mail accounts), but you can also e-mail individual friends and either find them or invite them to get on board too.
• Then we’ve got LibraryThing, which has been around a bit longer than GoodReads, but seems to put less of an emphasis on the social networking side and more on the physical cataloging of your book collection. There are message boards and a “zeitgeist overview,” where you can see what’s being tagged the most, what’s being read the most, which books have the highest ratings, which authors are active on LibraryThing and much more.
• Finally, for those of you itching to not just see what other people think about certain books, but to get your grubby hands on those books themselves, there’s Swaptree and What’s On My Bookshelf, both of which specialize in letting users trade books (and in the case of Swaptree, music, DVDs, and video games, too). If you’re looking for a way to manage your book habit without becoming a crazy packrat who has crumbly old books stashed in every nook in your house (not that there’s anything wrong with that), a swap program might just be the thing you need. It’s like a library, only you’re required to bring in some of your own books before you can check any out.
What book-related social networking sites do YOU use?
Every book is a crapshoot. You can only tell so much about what’s inside from cover blurbs and reviews. You have to wade in, get acclimated, and finally — if it’s comfortable enough — you can dunk your head under and become totally submerged in the story. But that journey from knowing nothing about a book to being completely absorbed in its story is different every single time for every single book. 
I’m impatient, so I’ve found that most of my favorite books are books that hook me within a few paragraphs and I don’t have to work to read them. Right now I’m fighting with this one book — The Implacable Order of Things — that is so beautiful in so many ways but also soooo tedious to read. I feel like I’ve been reading it for weeks and weeks, when I’ve really only been reading it for a week and I’m a mere 42 pages in. I’ll read a few pages and then I’ll put it down and pick up Freakonomics to read about real-estate trends cross-sectioned with the prevalence of mercury in Mississippi River catfish (okay, not really, but someone should look into that).
There’s just something about it that hasn’t grabbed me yet. But I don’t want to give up on it because the writing is objectively beautiful (José Luís Peixoto’s original text was translated to English from Portuguese by Richard Zenith) and you would hope that a writer who can spin such lovely phrases would be able to deliver on a grander scale and pull the whole story together.
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If you’ve spent even a fraction of a second on the internet, you’ve likely stumbled across a Gawker Media blog (check out the full list of them here). Nick Denton’s empire of niche blogs has come as close to conquering the internet as possible.
Which is, presumably, why Gawker Media felt the need to ride the wave of their success and put out a dead-tree edition of industry secrets: The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media. 
The Guide is a parody business/self-help-type book, supposedly brimming with secrets that will help any hapless schmo climb and backstab his way to the mountaintop of media mogul…hood. Yeah, mogulhood.
Secrets like:
- • Editor rejection letters and what they really mean
- • An NPR pledge-drive wishlist (Fresh Air fresheners, Crate+Barrel compost hutch, Sharper Image electronic chin stroker, haw haw)
- • What “TK” means in a newsroom lore
- • Professional thank-you card ideas (such as “Your wife was all over me at the company picnic. … Thanks for making that possible.”)
And so much more. Except, sadly, the vast majority of the jokes fall flat. They’re not particularly insightful or clever, and the whole tone of the book seems to fall short of Gawker’s trademark witty irreverence.
That’s not to say that the book is without redeeming moments. The listing of magazines and which of them best reflects certain personalities (”People: Do you actually care for celebrities, like do you cry when something bad happens to them?” or “Elle: What’s your absolute bottom line for scented candles? Is it $35/candle?”) is pretty funny.
Gawker’s strength seems to exist most strongly in pixel form (The Shelf Life already covered a book by the author of Gawker sports blog Deadspin). The bar is set pretty high when The Daily Show crew can churn out a textbook parody and have me guffawing at every page. Which, for Gawker, should mean stick to what you know: the interwebs.
While perusing the new releases at Amazon, I noticed local boy John Grisham’s new tome — The Appeal — and had a mini-freakout. Why, you ask?
Settle down, font dorks (a group I’m proud to be a part of). I know it’s not even close (the book title seems to be written in some kind of light version of Bodoni, while the CA’s nameplate is in Caslon). But still, it gave me a little thrill to think that maybe John Grisham might have spent a little ink on our dear daily and the riveting, fast-paced inner workings of a metro paper — the mayoral scandals! school shootings! the tanking newspaper industry! the undercover trips to the strip clubs! the book blogging!
But, alas, it’s another courtroom drama. Sorry, journalism nerds. Maybe next time.
