Sometimes a post is just a post. Here's a snippet recommending good literary blogs and why we like them:

If you have a taste for literary blogs, you.re looking at a microcosm of a subculture, the flea on the underbelly if you like. But I began reading literary blogs over two years ago because of a growing dissatisfaction with the way mainstream media covered books.

Reviews shrank; serious critics shared space with blurb readers masquerading as reviewers; publishers were increasingly justified in creating a culture where authors were the celebrity du jour, because the hype worked; and some genres close to my heart (science fiction, science writing, graphic novels, fiction from subcultures, crime and detective fiction) never got any kind of meaningful attention.

It seemed I wasn't the only reader who felt this way. Blogs like the Bookslut and The Return of the Reluctant slammed the incestuous preciousness of Dave Eggers and company ferociously, refused to take the pronouncements of the NYT's awe-inspiring Michiko Kakutani as the word of god, pointed us in the direction of wonderful new authors whom we never got to hear enough about and generally shook up the landscape.

Over at the Literary Dick, Jonathan Ames plays sleuth, answering questions about literary mysteries and scandals. Maud Newton and the Literary Saloon red-flagged the New York Times for its new review policies.

Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncractic Mind brought crime fiction and noir fiction to the forefront, and there are at least a hundred others, not forgetting the granddaddies of litblogs, ArtsJournal and Arts & Letters Daily.