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Jaybird 25 Comments

(This is a guest post from our very own Maribou!)

So, at work and also just because it’s what I love to do, I often spend a lot of time connecting people with books.  Mostly that’s an art form – kinda like fortune telling – but I usually end up helping them find their own ways to find books, too.  And in the course of all that, I come across a lot of people who are out there playing Yente for readers.  I recently finished braindumping all of these encounters (and my coworkers’ similar knowledge) into a giant readers’ advisory guide, and one of the sections – my favorite – is called Great Conversations.

I was showing this particular page off to Jaybird and he said, “THAT’S A GUEST POST!” and I said, “Fine,” so here it is.  Also, if y’all have some favorite sites of this nature, you should totally write about them in the comments. Because I love finding new ones.

Where We Go To Read (And Talk About) Books (And Movies (And Music (And Videogames)))

The sites below include a wide range of voices: formal and intimate, hilarious and thoughtful, canon and countercanon.  What they share is a fierce, thirsty, and inviting enthusiasm for culture (including, but not always limited to, books).

Autostraddle: Books – sharp-witted, woman-focused, and not always safe for work

AV Club – The Onion‘s (relatively) sincere forum for reviews, news, and discussion about books, movies, music, games, tv, etc.

Blogging for a Good Book (Williamsburg Regional Library) – there are hundreds of public library book review blogs on the web. This one is the best.

Bookotron – it can be a bit hard to find your way around this site, but it’s worth some extra effort.  Tons of in-depth content from and about a wide range of brilliant authors. Check out the podcasts!

Bookbeast – about a billion fascinating articles and videos about book stuff… per day.

Books I Done Read – our extremely unscientific poll suggests that people who like this review blog also like: Harry Potter, animated gifs, Paul Auster, and/or  creative nonfiction… the author’s varied tastes remind us of the Sesame Street “One of These Things” game, in the best possible way.  Plus, it’s really funny.

Bookshelves of Doom – Leila Roy is a community college librarian, book reviewer, pop culture maven, and pendant-maker who lives in Maine. If you don’t like young adult books, you probably won’t find much here.  If you DO like YA books – you will probably end up visiting this site at least once a week.

Brainpickings – You know that one friend you have? The one who is always super-excited about some random fascinating thing they just found? The one who wants to tell you ALL about it, at length, and you don’t even mind because they are so happy, and the thing itself is so cool?  This site is the web equivalent. You never know what they’ll be on about, but it’ll almost always be exciting.  And more often than not, there will be a book involved.

The Browser – if you like weighty, provocative, and intellectually stimulating prose, you need this website. The editors select 5-6 favorites each day, “mostly from trawling RSS feeds and home pages and Twitter streams.”

Eve’s Alexandria – The ladies of Eve’s Alexandria play their cards a little closer to the chest.  They take their time about posting. They don’t review just any old book.  And their razor-sharp intelligence makes you think about even old favorites in a new way.  Lots here for lovers of speculative fiction, literary prizewinners, and/or British classics.

Flavorwire Books – zippy, short, list-oriented articles with lots of pictures. Never fails to entertain.

Kirkus Reviews – the archives go back to 1933, but there’s nothing stodgy about this venerable magazine: its reviewers shoot from the hip. Come for the snark, stay for the starred reviews.

The Millions – the New York Times calls The Millions “indispensable.” It’s hip, self-consciously literate, and really hard to put down (especially if you’re reading it on a tablet).

Neglected Books – “where forgotten books are remembered”. The anonymous author of this book blog is determined to resurrect the beautiful-but-ignored classics of the last couple of centuries (although there is also a “Justly Neglected?” category for the duds).  This site is perfect for days when everything new feels old and tired…

New York Review of Books – towers over most of its litmag peers.  The essays are often even better than the reviews.

NPR Books – come for the summer reading lists, stay for the author interviews.

Paste: Signs of Life in Music, Film, and Culture – the book section of this website is great (and refreshingly comics-heavy), but the best way to enjoy it is to start on the front page, where you can see the entire amazing panorama.

Powell’s Books: Staff Picks – One of the most eclectic congregations of reviewers on the Web.

The Rejectionist – Sarah McCarry is a novelist who likes “fomenting insurrection, crushed velvet, and getting in trouble.” Her elegant, wide-ranging blog is wry, biting, revolutionary, and compassionate. Also, she talks about books a lot.

Tales from the Reading Room – Victoria Best used to be a literature professor, but now she writes full-time. Her academic background permeates this “literary salon where all are welcome.” Thoughtful, nuanced reviews of unusual books.

things mean a lot – intensely personal, intensely intellectual, in-depth reflections on one woman’s reading.  Lengthy, delectable reviews.

Vulpes Libris – a pack of literate foxes who read and write voraciously. Or, perhaps, a pack of British litbloggers, who do the same.

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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25 Comments

  1. If you like SF/Fantasy, tor.com has some great reviews/essays/blogs. Here, for instance, are their A Song of Ice and Fire recaps.

    • Heh. I am amused because the only reason tor.com didn’t make it onto this list is that I’d already mentioned it like 800 times in the rest of the big thing this thing is part of.

      Soooooooooooo much love for those guys.

  2. The Browser looks really good. I’m going to be wandering through it for a few days. It might make my daily rotation.
    The AV Club is really good. As Mike says Tor.com has a lot of good stuff. They have done a ST:TNG series rewatch which was really fun. They are doing DS9 now.

    • I think what I like best about tor.com is a) the art stuff (the artists’ alphabet is on my favorite-things-to-look-at-ever list), and b) anything Jo Walton writes ever, but especially her series of posts Revisiting the Hugos. But really I agree with you and Mike – it’s just so incredibly full of awesome…

      • Jo is, objectively speaking, amazing. She used to be a frequent poster at rec.arts.sf.written, and her contributions there amounted to a graduate course in how to read SF as literature. In particular, what she wrote about Cherryh’s Cyteen help change it from “mostly impenetrable” to one of my favorite SF books.

  3. For more information about 19th century Russian literature (including poetry) than you could possibly ever need, XIX Bek is the place. The only unfortunate part is that it can be difficult to find English translations of some of the works that they write about.

  5. 4chan also has decent review threads (even on /b/, surprisingly–though they still sound like 14 year olds… “I didn’t like that one…” “that’s because you’re too dumb to get it”).

    • Heh. I think this is the closest to intersecting that the two vectors (my work) and (4chan) have ever come. I will check them out, though.

  6. Awesome list, Maribou. I will be bookmarking THIS post.

    Just wanted to note that while the actual writing at AVClub is generally sincere, the comment boards can be anything but – but for all that they can be Snark Central, they also have some of the funniest, quickest wits you’ll find anywhere, and I often get more pleasure (and surprisingly incisive insight) from there than from the actual articles. It’s the only other site I really comment on besides this one (my handle over there is different though).

    Also, I was skimming through that Brain Pickings site and I came across these quotes from Greil Marcus, who I have sometimes had a bit of an issue with (finding him to over-intellectualize rock music which was IMO really just meant to be exciting – see also: Christgau, Robert), but here I find him dead-on, on the fallacy of divisions between “high” and “low” culture (paging NewDealer:-):

    I couldn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now, why George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips, or the comic books by anonymous artists and inkers and graphics people, were lesser art — really, why whey weren’t better art, the real art — than the pop art classics that Philip Guston and Roy Lichtenstein had made of them. Nearly everything I’ve written is based on the conviction — the experience — that there are depths and satisfactions in blues, rock & roll, detective stories, movies, television, as rich and as profound as those that can be found anywhere else. Who, really, could argue that the sense of transportation, even in the religious sense — taking of oneself out of oneself, connecting oneself to something greater, something you know in the moment, in your heart, that every person who was ever born must experience, or their life is going to be poor — who can argue that that sense of transportation is not as present in The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” … as in the art most exalted in motive, most revered in history?

    Well, yeah. And:

    What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.

    I have half a mind to go back and replace the whole text of my Dislocation post with these two sentences, since it says what I was trying to get at in a mere fraction of the words.

  7. Thank you so much for the mention – I feel very honored! And so many sites I’ve never visited before here – I can see I shall have to do something about that. Consider yourself duly bookmarked.

  8. Bowing deeply. Applauding heartily. Begging an encore.

    Since this is presumably part of something larger, maybe an encore is possible?

    And Bookshelves of Doom! Forever indebted for that.

    • I’d be happy to email anyone who wants it the link to the whole larger thing … just don’t want to tie my pseud to my work identity QUITE so “HEY LOOK OVER HERE” as by linking to it. my email is marseillaise at gmailorhotmailwhicheveryoudrather.

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