Top 100 blogs

The Times of London has put up a list of the one hundred best in what reporter Bryan Appleyard calls the “blogscape” (a better word than “blogosphere,” he rightly says). In the category of Words, seven are named:

• Patrick Kurp’s Anecdotal Evidence. If Kurp is not the dean he is the best of us book bloggers.

• Frank Wilson’s Books, Inq.—The Epilogue. Appleyard characterizes it as a “hub” where “many bloglines intersect.”

• James Wolcott’s blog at Vanity Fair. The prose is “high-dandy,” as Appleyard calls it.

• Jessa Crispin’s Blog of a Bookslut. The blog is not “from several hands,” as Appleyard the paper has it (he they may be thinking of the monthly web magazine). Crispin is reliably amusing from a reliably “hip” perspective.

• Joseph Sullivan’s Book Design Review. Lots of jacket art—more jacket art than book design, really—with critical comments interspersed.

• The Orwell Diaries. Published by the Orwell Prize, the blog follows the diary, day by day, as Orwell wrote it: “Each diary entry is published on the blog exactly seventy years after it was originally written by Orwell, beginning in 1938. . . .”

• And, finally, this self-same Commonplace Blog.

The Times includes Nigeness under the category of Original Thinkers, but Nige thinks originally in strikingly original words. He is more literary than philosophical, but should be read no matter what category he belongs to.