Literary blogs

Seems newspaper book reviewers are angry with bloggers invading their territory and writing online book reviews or simply making comments online about books.

Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times writes about the "Book Review Wars" and cites Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic: "The book review section … remains the forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art and argument, and not merely as opportunities for shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting."

As a blogger who rants about books, shallowly or not, I wonder... if blogger comments are as bad as Dirda claims, then why should he be worried? Could it be he think readers are tired of the traditional book critic's own "grandstanding and overblown ranting" and want to hear more from people like themselves?

In any case, people from the "lit blogosphere" have responded to Dirda and started a virtual war of words between the lit bloggers and the newspaper book reviewers - via the web, of course.

According to the following article, they have come to a kind of truce and agreement that they can co-exist in the world of books, and share the readers. See the complete story from the Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2007:
Literary Blogs and the Critics