HOWZAT

Words

evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com
A formidable literary blog by Patrick Kurp, from Washington state, Anecdotal Evidence is forceful, sensitive and highly personal. “Maintaining a literary blog,” Kurp says, “is like keeping a big band on the road during the waning days of swing music. The audience is ageing and no longer guaranteed.”

dgmyers.blogspot.com
A Commonplace Blog is another literary blog, this time from Texas. It’s a suave, informative discussion of reading in the broadest sense. DG Myers is an academic, and he grapples with literary and philosophical ideas more than Kurp.

booksinq.blogspot.com
A mainly literary blog, this time from Frank Wilson in Philadelphia. It’s basically a hub, providing links to items of interests. Wilson is opinionated, passionate and generous. Many bloglines intersect here.

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vanityfair.com/online/wolcott
James Wolcott’s blog on the Vanity Fair site provides high-dandy prose for the East Coast smart set. “Let us part the beaded curtains of time...” It all comes from another age — just what we need now.

bookslut.com/blog
Morsels from several hands about the latest in the books world, with handy hyperlinks. In a recent amusing item, the writer instructively experimented with reading a section from Charlotte Roche’s X-rated Wetlands alongside one from Shmuley Boteach’s The Kosher Sutra, a sage guide to reviving your sex life from a seasoned counsellor. As she put it, she had to stop before she got the bends.

nytimesbooks.blogspot.com
A nicely snippy blog about the design of book covers: the ones that made it and the ones that shouldn’t have. One juicy item recently lined up all the covers for new editions of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, “Now a Major Motion Picture”, noting that “most of them are pretty horrible”.

orwelldiaries.wordpress.com
Seventy years to the day after he wrote them, George Orwell’s diary entries are reproduced here in sequence each day, word for word, starting in 1938 and running until 1942. A more rounded version of the writer emerges, a man who was concerned not just with politics and the world order, but with how many eggs his chickens had laid.

Cult

jeffreyarchers.blogspot.com
Hypnotically awful, as in: “We dined around a magnificent oak table in their private room, with its beautiful Jacobean oak pannelling (sic); the food was sumptuous, the wine delicious and the company scintillating. Sitting next to me was a man who had recently lost $75m with Lehmann (sic) Brothers, and on the other side, a man who sold Dutch paintings, so it was an evening of learning.”

goop.com
Having bored a host of interviewers with her macrobiotic credentials, Gwyneth Paltrow has styled herself as the detoxified Martha Stewart. Her all-encompassing lifestyle site places tips on how you, too, can accelerate your bowel eliminations beside her treatise on creating the perfect family gathering, which includes getting everyone to rummage through your cupboards to help you donate to the local food bank, should you happen to be wondering.

pauldaniels.co.uk/blog
Provided you don’t lose the will to live while reading, Paul Daniels’s jottings (and holiday snaps) about his colourful life are a must. A sample: “Yes, folks, we are home again after an overnight flight from Barbados. Debbie’s Mam and Dad met us at Gatwick, which was amazing because it was still nighttime at 0630hrs.”