Readers and writers blog

We probably spend more time on our blogroll than do other websites, and that reflects an interest that often is more intense than that of most readers.

Our blogroll is important to us because each addition to it represents a lot of searching for good writing from a lot of different quarters. That doesn’t mean that each site listed on our blogroll is necessarily the best of its genre — although some clearly are — but each has been chosen for its writing.

Now that also doesn’t mean that the writing on each weblog is Strunk & White perfect. We know that at least two of the blogs are by writers for whom English is not their native language. And some sites may have an occasional spelling or grammatical error that wrinkles the pedant’s nose.

And while form, rules and style do play a role — they are in fact the key reasons for some of our selections — we look for at least three other factors as well:

• Is the writer comfortable with the subject, or, if not, is he or she making an earnest attempt to communicate about it?

• Is there a contemplative quality to the writing, the result of some serious and sometimes lonely thought?

• And, last but not least, is the website interesting? And by this we don’t mean interesting to the writer but to us. Is it something we ordinarily wouldn’t be reading?

It’s this last factor that helps explain the diversity that we try to maintain in our blogroll — an attempt to expand our reading to places we wouldn’t ordinarily visit.

(We should confess right now that our quest for diversity probably will not take us into two areas — celebrities and politics. Not that they don’t deserve their place in the blogosphere. They just bore our ass off.)

Diversity, of course, raises a problem for the future: What if we find a blog that is even better than the one we’ve listed in a particular genre? Well, we don’t know. Maybe lump them in categories, a step we took with inactive sites discussed in our last entry.

Which brings us to our next subject — our intermediate blogroll page. If you’ve clicked on a blogroll listing on our main page, you’ve been sent to a separate page with the same listings in the same order, but with a brief summary of the listing and, in addition to the direct link to it, another link that takes you to our review of the site.

We know it can be annoying to have to navigate an extra page, but we figured if you’re reading our site, you’re not the usual impatient, wham-bam net surfer. And since every site on our blogroll has been reviewed by us, we felt you might want to know why the listing is there — even if you disagree with the selection.

Oh, and one more thing. If you now visit the nonfiction section of ‘Works’ at the top right of the main page, you’ll find that “Adrift in America” is now offered either in its full text or by chapters. The whole thing is 102,000 words, about the same length as but considerably less-read than “On the Road,” written by Jack Kerouac on a 120-foot-long scroll of typing paper shown at the top of this entry. The point is, this kind of length can be unwieldly, especially when returning to the text. Now the anchor links can take you straight to the beginning of chapters.

It’s a bit of favoritism, we’ll admit, but we’re waiting for you writers out there to submit your Paradise Losts, your Ulysseses, even your On the Roads, and when those big bad boys come in, we’ll give them the same favored treatment.

– Sid Leavitt