Housekeeping notes

Regular visitors may have noticed that my blogging has slackened off over the last year.  Several reasons account for this, most of which I will not discuss here. Suffice to say that my work schedule and personal obligations make this impossible at the moment. All is not lost though.  First, I still post 4 or 5 links on Facebook each week, with commentary.  Feel free to friend me or subscribe to my updates (note: they are mainly about climate change). I have been working on several long essays which will make it to  this blog eventually. I type them on my ipad on the bus over several days or weeks, and I haven’t had time to transfer them over to here.

For the time being, here are some excellent blogs which I check regularly.

• The Story’s Story. Jake Seliger is an academic who writes often about literature and publishing.
• The Black Sheep Dances, a good book review blog, with some emphasis on European literature.
• Washington Monthly and Reality Chex, 2 good liberal blogs about current events. The commenters on Washington Monthly are crude and hilarious.  I follow the thinkprogress site pretty closely as well.
• Chamber Four, Books Blog and HTML Giant. All three have excellent book reviews. Sometimes Critical Mass has good articles and reviews, but they also publish a lot of miscellaneous crap having to do  with the National Book Awards.  (They recently had a good series about comic fiction).
• Philosopher’s Stone  (retired left-wing philosophy professor) and    the Non Sequitur, a blog that analyzes political fallacies by 2 philosophy profs.
• The House Next Door/Slant Magazine (group cultural blog with emphasis  on film) and Mumpsimus (Matt Cheney, lit critic, sci fi, film, African culture, etc).
• Interestingly I have been reading Slate fairly often on my ipad and loving it. Also, love the fact that I read  copies of the New Yorker on my Nook device. (Subscriptions are quite  low at $3 a month – but this is available only on Nook devices, and not on Nook software on the ipad for example).
• Blurrybalengo is a literary history blog by a book fiend named Alberto Balengo  I met at Johns Hopkins. I was getting a graduate degree there while  Alberto was only a freshman, but we shared an interest in European fiction (and Balengo got me interested in  Italian author Dino Buzzati).   I’m always discovering good titles here.
• Finally, a recommendation for Mr. Reader, a great ipad RSS reader that actually does what it’s supposed to do.  Also, I subscribe by email  to Long Reads,  a compilation of well-written long articles. Mainly from the usual suspects (New Yorker, Rolling Stone, etc), but some surprises as well.  Long Reads works great in conjunction with Instapaper ipad app in storing longer articles for easy offline reading.

Also, you may have noticed that I now include an Book/Ebook Review link at the top. For the next year or two I plan to review books a lot more often than before. I’ll try in particular to sort through the indie authors now publishing.  I won’t have time to write a lot of reviews, but I want to make it easier for people to learn which ebooks are wowwing me at the moment.  I also  follow the ebooks being given away at the librarything member giveaway section (not super high quality, but I’ll mention it here if anything jumps out). Finally, I follow the #eprdctn hashtag on twitter pretty religiously,although mainly as a lurker.

Even though I have been blogging rarely, I have been reading a LOT and writing a good bit too. Just not here (not yet anyway).