Former New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer has picked what she deems the 25 best blogs – out of an estimated 80 million – and provides examples of each in the anthology ULTIMATE BLOGS: MASTERWORKS FROM THE WILD WEB.
The end result? To borrow an Internet phrase: Meh.
Even if it didn’t purport to showcase “the best,” the book proves that tastes are entirely subjective, especially in the blogosphere. On most of what Boxer likes, I fail to share her enthusiasm.
For instance, Angry Black Bitch is represented by a rant against Peter Jackson’s KING KONG. Yes, that movie sucked, but not for the reasons she asserts: that it’s a thinly veiled tale of a white woman being molested by a big, scary black man. Much ado about nothing, methinks, and I can’t even enjoy it as novelty.
I dislike political blogs and personal blogs, just as much as I disliked the political and personal zines of the pre-blog ’90s, so I’m prone to be allergic to several of the chapters here. Ditto for those blogs that insist rules of grammar, punctuation and style go out the window. To me eyes, it’s like trying to decipher codes. Did no one pay attention in third grade?
There are highlights, though, such as the catty fashion-busters of Go Fug Yourself, one of whom likens actress Anne Hathaway’s choice of dress to a doll that sat atop the author’s grandmother’s toilet. Ironic Sans is great at providing short bits of catch-as-catch-can humor, while Radio.Uruguay is an interesting photoblog from Eastern Europe.
The Smoking Gun is here, too. It’s a terrific website, but not a blog, and hardly one so obscure that it needs discovering via a book like this. –Rod Lott
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Did the author mention any sort of criteria she used when choosing these “outstanding” blogs? I’m curious why she thought The Smoking Gun should be included in a blog book, as well.
I gave the galley to a co-worker when I was done reading it, so I don’t have it for reference, but I seem to recall her introduction at least acknowledges to some degree that these are the ones that spoke to her, after narrowing down from thousands.
I’m so utterly uninterested in this one, for all the reasons you mention, and because blogs change so quickly that it’ll be irrelevant in months if not minutes.
Me three on the “meh” train. The comparison to the zine scene is spot on, dude. Very few people were able to capture the coolness of the zine scene via compilation, and I think that’s equally true of the blogosphere.
The only good compilation book I saw on the zine scene was THE BOOK OF ZINES by Chip Rowe. And I swear I’m not just saying that because I had stuff in it from my zine. What made it good it because it was fun, because a lot of zines were fun. A lot of blogs are fun to read, and I think if you were to ask bloggers why they blog, most of them would say “because it’s fun,” not “because I want to ferret out injustices of political persecution” or whatever.
Even though I have a story in the Factsheet Five Zine Reader, I have to agree. There are a couple of great stories in there, but there are better avenues if you want to change the world, and most of them involve getting of the couch and being a worthwhile human being (which isn’t nearly as fun as reviewing sweet science fiction books).
Sarah Boxer recently reviewed a series of books about blogging and the internet for the New York Review of Books. Just as the NYRB crowd discovered “television” around the late 1960s when PBS started broadcasting, they have just recently discovered the internet and “blogging.” These people are so far out of step with the rest of the world.
What is this the television of which you speak?