Literary Blogs

[Stewart]

Of course, there's far too many blogs out there in the blogosphere which makes it an exciting place to read about all manner of books and, at the same time, it's a terrain to large to properly navigate. Inevitably, the better blogs rise to the top and become better known.

The ones I read regularly are:

• Asylum
• Literary Saloon
• Three Percent
• Guardian Books Blog

Added to that, there are plenty of others that I drop by from time to time to catch up on (Sometimes just to see if Feeding The Pigeons has been updated.) which are listed on my own blog's blogroll. I've still not quite got into the habit of using RSS properly, preferring to just surf than have everything aggregated for me.

So, which literary blogs interest you? Feel free, of course, to plug your own, too.

[Eric]

Does anyone look regularly at The Complete Review:

http://complete-review.com/new/new.html

It's quite an active website.

[A Common Reader]

"Feel free, of course, to plug your own, too"

Thanks for the invitation Stewart.

I maintain and write A Common Reader. This began as a place to publish fuller versions of my Amazon reviews but now seems to have taken on a life of its own.

I have hosted it on other platforms before but moved it to Typepad last month, being fed up with hackers corrupting my own hosted versions (notably Wordpress).

Tom

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Eric

Does anyone look regularly at The Complete Review:

I do. Indeed I mentioned its blog - the Literary Saloon - in the original post. I love the range of the reviews there, especially when I find myself looking at a book in a store and decide not to buy it (yet!) and then, the next day, it turns out to be the next book reviewed there.

[Howard]

The Literary Saloon is indeed an excellent blog. It's usually the first thing I read when I go online in the morning, as it is always extremely up to date about all matters literary.

As a literary translator, though, I do have one bone to pick with them. The Literary Saloon very much champions books in translation, and is full of news about them, but when the Complete Review does a review of a translation, although it always mentions the translator by name at the top of the page, it never makes any comment on the translation in the body of the text, seeming almost to forget that it is a translation. I know this from personal experience, as several of my translations have been reviewed by them.

[Stewart]

I can understand the frustration. From my experience, I don't tend to comment on the translation so much in my blog reviews, partly because my experience of the original's language is lacking and therefore I'm in no way able to gauge how the translator has take to the task and tackled it.

[nnyhav]

Just what is a litblog? News & reviews, publishers, newspapers, magazines big & little & onlyne, established & aspiring scholars, critics, writers, readers? There's a profusion of categories, and much rumination thereon. Is ThePage a poetry blog or assimilator? Conversational Reading has spawned a quarterly review (#11 Spring '08 just out); Spinozablue aspires to little magazinedom, wood s lot and Pinakothek (Luc Sante) to something else entirely, something hard to characterize. Me, I use the blogrolls at TheValve, Quick Study, The Reading Experience in lieu of bookmarks. And consider my own scrabblings as more reading diary than anything else.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by nnyhav

Just what is a litblog? News & reviews, publishers, newspapers, magazines big & little & onlyne, established & aspiring scholars, critics, writers, readers? There's a profusion of categories, and much rumination thereon.

To me, it's just a blog that deals with literature as subject matter, be it reviews, experiences, criticism, reporting or whatever - a catchall term.

[Eric]

Howard says:

The Literary Saloon very much champions books in translation, and is full of news about them, but when the Complete Review does a review of a translation, although it always mentions the translator by name at the top of the page, it never makes any comment on the translation in the body of the text, seeming almost to forget that it is a translation. I know this from personal experience, as several of my translations have been reviewed by them.

The in-depth reviewing of translations is still in its infancy in the USA and UK. Firstly, hardly any reviewer knows the source language (or even French or German to compare the translation into those languages). This means that they haven't a clue as to how or whether the translation matches the original. So when they've skimmed the first ten and the last ten pages, read the blurb on the jacket and cobbled together their rushed review, they feel that they have to say something about the translation. So, if they mention anything at all they will say:

"Reads smoothly" or "Mellifluous" or "X's superb translation".

The last of these means that the translator didn't write wooden translationese and actually got their grammar right. Great compliment, but the reviewer is just pretending to be wise. It's usually a journo, with no feel for languages, who has learnt the technique of reviewing books they've never read. So, if a Literary Saloon review is merely lifted from a British or American books page, you can expect glib ignorance.

[Eric]

Has anyone mentioned the following prize anywhere else on this website:

http://www.boersenverein.de/de/112141?pid=199913

I see that BlogSpy mentioned a link to this year's winner, but has there been any discussion here about the priize as a whole and the prizewinners over the years?

[Stewart]

Nope, no discussion of it.

[B&b ex libris]

I have a book review blog, and I think this is the right place to mention it. I mainly read world lit, with some ARC thrown in every once in a while, I hope you enjoy...let me know what you think!!

B&b ex libris

That's my plug!

[matt.todd]

Did someone say free plug?! Excellent.

Lol, my thingy is just reviews of all the books I have read this year. And the occasional rant. I am in Australia, so I read a lot of Australian literature that may or may not be available in other places. I don't know, though.

The link is in my sig.

[nnyhav]

Just stumbled upon this re- & inter-view aggregator that looks worthwhile:
SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

[nnyhav]

Online University Reviews' The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs includes 31 English professors.
(via thevalve.org, not on the list)

[Eric]

These Liberal Arts people are so liberal (in the British sense) that they don't have a rubric for "literature", just one for "English" as if all wisdom were written in that language.

[Beth]

It's not?

[Cocko]

Okay I'll have a got a plugging my own blog... I notice it takes a similar blogging approach to Matt Todd, which is great as I am also Australian.

It started off as a reading log in Jan 2006, this migrated to a blog in late 2007 and recently I have expanded it a little further as blogging has taken hold.

The reading log is pretty much a reaction to riding on public transport after several years driving to work. So, since Jan 2006 I've read 88 novels and novellas and the blog has plot summaries, personal comments, cover art, and a spreadsheet that can be downloaded with more stats on these works. The new areas I've introduced are related news and views of the authors and works in the blog and a quotes section.

Here are the authors that appear most often:

John Steinbeck (5 novels, 5 novellas)
Peter Carey (7 novels, 1 novella)
Haruki Murakami (5 novels, 1 novella)

If anyone would like to check it out, here it is: ABOUT THE LOG | the reading log (book review) blog: the novel and novella, fiction and non-fiction.

[Freeda]

Hope it's okay if yet another Aussie leaps in to plug his own blog. Mine's called A Dancing Bear.

It's not entirely a literary blog - I'd say about half of it is directly concerned with books and language, while the rest deals with whatever takes my fancy/gets my goat on a given day.

So it might be stretching a point to call it literary - but I hope it's always literate. Drop by and leave a comment.