Some Choice Book Blogs

Dear Book Lover - WSJ: November 13, 2009

Would you share your thoughts on the best blogs/bloggers who focus on books? Favorites? Ones you respect? Popular ones? —P.G., Berkeley, Calif.

Book bloggers, of whom there seem to be thousands, are strictly a matter of taste. My taste runs to blogs focused on fiction, updated frequently, charitable or spiteful as appropriate, generous with links and bright and clean in appearance. I also insist the writers know the difference between it's and its. Five blogs I like:

A Commonplace Blog: I first read D.G. Myers, an English professor at Texas A&M University, in his blistering critique of the "self-conscious, writerly prose" of "serious fiction" in Atlantic magazine (available online and highly recommended even if you disagree). He's every bit as indifferent to political correctness on his blog, where he recently took a cudgel to Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ("the most overrated novel ever").

Bookdwarf: Megan Sullivan, a buyer at the Harvard Book Store, is a thoughtful reviewer of new fiction. I bookmarked her site even before I saw her praise for a recent and not well-known book I admired, "Blame" by Michelle Huneven. Maybe I only find Ms. Sullivan smart and generous because we agree about so much.

Bookninja: George Murray, a Canadian writer, may be too profane for the faint of heart, but I found his cussing about the publishing industry a bracing antidote to a lot of goody-goodyness in literary blogdom. His headline on a link to a story about the current book-industry price wars: "Today in the most depressing thing to ever hit a depressing industry full of depressing drunks."

Bookslut: Jessa Crispin doesn't think of herself as a critic: "I feel free to ignore the wider culture at large, rather than suffer through a William Vollmann book just because his books contribute to the larger cultural conversation. I, and this Web site, exist outside of all of that, and happily so." Fine by me. I have no problem with a reader who, when her computer goes rogue, consoles herself with Mavis Gallant short stories and a bottle of vodka.

So Many Books: Stefanie (she doesn't give her last name) lives in Minneapolis and works at a university law library. She's been blogging for six years, which makes her a grizzled veteran. The lists of books she has read in the past three years are impressively eclectic—this year from Niccolo Machiavelli to Christopher Moore. And she loves libraries, as I do.