Blogged In

Two new books that look at the blog-world in very different ways.

I began paying attention to blogs only after writer Amitava Kumar began posting. Kumar, the author of Bombay, London, New York, Husband Of A Fanatic and Home Products, has a fine way of filtering literature, politics, and culture in a kind of personal writing that he brings with intelligent economy into his blogging. What is invaluable is how he draws your attention to other significant writing, to the work of others. Kumar's blogrole led me to India Uncut, Maude Newton, Sepia Mutiny, and Amardeep Singh.

My introduction to the blogpshere began on a high note because I was lucky to begin with such fine bloggers, but it's obvious that the blogsphere is now overrun with amateur book blogs.

Two new books look at the blog-world in very different ways. Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur insists that the blogsphere is seriously infantilising culture, while The Bookalchoholic's Guide to Book Blogs (by Rebecca Gillieron and Catheryn Kilgarriff) points out that these amateur book bloggers are revolutionising book reviewing and redefining our reading practices.

The Bookaholic's Guide to Book Blogs is one of the first books to act as a survey-guide to what is out there on offer for us in the world of the bookish blog. It categorises book blogs into Literary websites, Writer's blogs, Reader's blogs, Journalist's blogs, and Publisher's blogs. The editors devote small paragraphs to deftly evoke what each blog attempts. What interests them most is the reader's book-blog which is a non-professional book lover's take on books. Here amateur readers recommend books to one another and intensify an interactive community of readers. It is these amateur book reviewers, rather than professional book reviewers, who now seem to influence what books are worth reading. And also bring new books to the attention of a browsing public quicker than print magazines. The authors point to Dovegreyreader, a community nurse in Britain with a mind of her own who refuses to succumb to the hype created by professional book reviewers in order to offer her own opinion.

What is significant, they say, is that these amateur book bloggists don't have to go through editors and publishers to get their writing read. This can swing both ways — from an intelligent reader you get something that a professional writer may have missed, and from a mediocre writer you get…nothing. This is exactly what Keen worries about in his book. Keen notes that in the Web 2.0 world, there are more than 53 million blogs, and this number doubles every six months. At this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010. They have become so dizzyingly infinite, goes on to write Keen, that they have undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. Young people, he observes, are unable to tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on an amateur's blog. "For these Generation Y utopians, every posting is just another person's version of the truth; every fiction is just another person's version of the facts."

The Bookalchoholic's Guide to Book Blogs turns out to be more a snapshot than a history of the literary blogsphere. My disappointment with the book is that it confines itself only to blogs from the US and the UK. It would be worthwhile to have a book that looks at noteworthy blogs from elsewhere in the world. Some of the more interesting literary websites and book blogs the book points us to are: Salon, Booklust, Bookdwarf, Bookninja, Critical Mass, Guardian Unlimited: Arts Blog, Paper Cuts, Galleycat, and The Book Babes. The editors of The Bookalchoholic's Guide see their book as a celebration of the democratization of book reviewing, and they describe the book as a celebration: "We didn't want the existence of some of the first book bloggers to come and go without record," they note early on. The best bloggers, say these authors, are the ones who have no motive other than to share their love of books with other readers.

However, Keen in The Cult of the Amateur, observes that these websites are "creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity…they use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays and novels." He goes on to say that we are blogging with "monkey-like shamelessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, and our lack of lives." I find myself torn over the issues he raises. I have to admit that Keen's perspective seems authentic, and could easily be validated by what goes on in today's Web 2.0 world. And yet, I can't help thinking: no one is forcing anyone else to read all this stuff and to look at those videos. We always have a choice to switch off. However, having said that I also have to say: YouTube and MySpace I can live without, but I would be quite lost without Google and Wikipedia.

bwbooks 'at' bworldmail 'dot' com