Keep Blogging. We Read You: A Huge List of Literary Blogs

Recently, Daniel Green posted a paper entitled “ Bringing Something to the Party: Literary Weblogs Vs. The Print Media” . It tells the story of literary criticism, commentary, and chat, as they developed on websites, blogs, and social media.

Along the way, he points out that it isn’t always a linear upward trajectory. Lot of blogs die, or they slow down, or they fall into limbo. Green describes the demise of a group blog in 2012, and says it’s part of a larger situation.

Eventually the initial enthusiasm waned, although I would argue that in part this was because the original inspiration for the blog had been fulfilled and the idea of intelligent, informed critical writing appearing on the web no longer seemed such a novel proposition. Something similar happened with the first wave of literary weblogs. Although a few of them still exist (including my own, in an updated iteration), many do not, or at least have been inactive for a long time. But these blogs were in fact remarkably successful, not just in ultimately reaching a wide audience of interested readers but in establishing a space in the cybersphere for the nontrivial discussion of literature, and ultimately in changing the reading habits of many serious readers who previously would never have regarded the internet as a source of legitimate literary debate. I believe it fair to say that the notion one can find entirely respectable web-based critical commentary online is now incontestable and mostly noncontroversial. Someone surfing the web as I did 12 years ago will discover much of interest within a few clicks, although these sites and pages might not be blogs. But this, too, seems to me a sign of their success, not their obsolescence.
Today literary weblogs are more likely to be known simply as “book blogs,” and most of them have indeed settled for something like “book chat” as their mode of operation. More serious-minded blogs do remain, authored by reviewers, critics, and some academics, as well as by poetry and fiction writers using the weblog medium as more than a promotional instrument. Admittedly these blogs have a smaller audience than many literary bloggers had during their period of greatest notoriety, but they may also have a more easily assumed authority and less defensive tone. Nevertheless, the “litblog” is not the object of attention it once was, when it seemed for some to promise liberation from the arbitrary authority of print book reviewers and so-called literary journalists and for others to threaten the already wobbly status of book coverage in the digital era print press.
A significant factor in the relative decline of the litblog is surely the concurrent rise of social media, specifically the development of a substantial literary presence on Twitter and Facebook. The sort of brief commentary and linking with which literary blogging began, and continued to be a prominent feature, has largely been taken over by these social media forums, where a network of “connected” Friends and Followers exchange news and views, albeit often in an unavoidably offhand way due to the limitations of the medium used. To the extent that a need for “connection” itself is met by sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the same function as served by blogs becomes less urgent, since social media provides it more immediately and ultimately more broadly. Arguably, however, the force of this need was first fully expressed through the success of blogs, which demonstrated that it could be met through digital communication.
Bringing Something to the Party: Literary Weblogs Vs. The Print Media"

It seems the litblog may be in decline. As I go through my feed reader for these litblog roundup posts, I notice so many blogs I had chosen to follow but which don’t have anything recent. Below, I’ve collected a list of nearly 650 litblogs that haven’t been updated in a while.

There are many reasons for a blog to go dormant. Passwords get lost. Sites get hacked. Websites become obsolete. Interests change. People die. I like to think, though, that all these bloggers need is some encouragement. I’m sharing this list, not to call out these hundreds of bloggers for being slackers, but to offer up some encouragement. For the readers out there: take a look at this list, see if anything strikes your fancy, and go post a comment to get a conversation started. For the writers of these blogs: take heart, keep blogging. We read you.

Here’s the list.