Book Blogs and Web Sites

I spend a lot of time on line reading about books. I used to spend a lot of time on Amazon, browsing their reviews and lists, but recently I’ve been reading book blogs and also library Web sites.

Book blogs are a mixed bag. Many of them offer multiple contributors, interviews with and articles about authors, and straightforward reviews. Some also publish news about the publishing industry, and about trends in literature. I find most of the ones I’ve visited bland and interchangeable. I also feel that this kind of information duplicates what's available in any good newspaper or magazine, and indeed the professionals are usually better at the task than the bloggers.

I enjoy book blogs where you get a sense of the blogger's personality. I recently found a kindred blogger at Another52Books. She’s got a lot of good reviews, and some funny peripheral kinds of content, such as an on-going series of posts about bad book covers. Like me, she reports a TBR pile that is growing faster than the rate at which she reads, and she's a fan of travel writing, and the occasional romance novel, along with mainstream fiction and mysteries.

Another good book blog is Woodge.com. The site is mostly a guy’s blog about life, his kids, his hobbies, etc. but he is a serious reader, and has a booknotes page with lots of reviews. He doesn't tolerate junk, and I especially like his sidebar list of “Recently abandoned books.” And, I like him because he is a record keeper, like I am: check out his list of every book he’s ever read!

I also like Zia Munshi, at Nom de Plume, who has a book category on her general-interest blog. Our reading lists seem to overlap a lot, too, and the same things irritate us (check out her post on the New York Times Best Book of the Last 25 Years).

The Madison Public Library has a blog called MADreads that is updated daily by different branch librarians. It always has fresh content, and I’ve been visiting it every day. I’ve found a few other library sites that are worth visiting:

The Morton Grove, Illinois public library maintains this page with links to lists of books organized by genre. I like these kinds of lists for when I’m in the mood for a specific kind of book, but am having trouble finding just the right one.

My favorite site, however, is run not by a library, but by a librarian, Nancy Pearl, the author of Book Lust, and the model for the librarian action figure (which I can’t believe no one in my family has yet purchased for me). Her reviews are succinct, and she is a great source of information about new fiction.

I'm adding all these links to my sidebar so they'll stick around.