too sweet to die

maudnewton:

I barely blog these days, as I’m trying among other things to finish a novel, but I’m curious what “book blogger” means in this context. Do we count the authors of posts at the New York Review of Books or The New Yorker? Or the writers of the daily reviews at Bookforum or the essays at the Los Angeles Review of Books, which are almost surely published using blogging software, or the items posted at The Millions or Full Stop or The New Inquiry or the (sadly defunct — because of the editor’s move to the New York Times books section) Second Pass, or in the monthly issue of Bookslut, to name just a few? What about the individual bloggers who write criticism outside of their sites?

To me, the term “book blogger” has never been more slippery — and therefore more meaningless.

And as the proliferation of the newer sites above demonstrates, the notion that online conversation about books among people who are not (yet) formal critics is in some way harming Literature is even more demonstrably hogwash now than when it was first hurled into the blogosphere nine years ago.

When socioeconomically privileged white dudes start whinging about their endangerment, it means you’re doing something right.