Where have all the book worms gone?

I know that I've been slacking a bit on the blog entries--this is not news--but rest assured that I've been diligently reviewing every single book that I read (with the odd exceptions of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna and Pauline Melville's The Ventriquist's Tale, both of which were good but both somehow missed getting reviewed) on my book review site. If you're not familiar with my book site, well, it's obviously linked (look up), and it's full of goofy reviews that include personal anecdotes and more often than not say little to nothing about the book itself: I'm awful fond of meditating on my own personal experience of the book without including so much as a decent summary. However, I do like to offer a list of links to other book review blogs, so that you can read summaries to your heart's content without the reviewer getting in the way with her dumb stories.

I've found some good ones in the past year: namely Wannabe Inkling, which is chockfull of good books and very thorough, very literary reviews (with excellent summaries). Also I've found some wonderful ones that focus primarily on Victorian literature (my English major heart went all aflutter when I read that one), or that, like The Restricted Section, subtitle themselves "what we read while we wait for the final Harry Potter" and sign themselves either "Flourish" or "Blotts" (my Potter-nerd heart gets all fluttery over this one).

Periodically, I go through this list of links to make sure they're still active.

Suddenly, with this testing of links, I found that only Wannabe Inkling, The Restricted Section and Reading Corner were still active: all the others had abandoned ship while my back was turned and left me and my two comrades to review all the books under the sun unaided and without company. Alas! thoguht I. I must sojourn into foreign lands and seek out new blogs and new reviews!

And, oh, what complete dismay I suffered when a Google search for "book review, blog" turned up nothing (well, there was a site or two dedicated to reviews of murder mysteries, but I, in all snootiness, admit that I'd hoped for books a little more, well, challenging). This, on a day when my friend Paul, from whence many excellent recommendations come (he works, after all, in my favorite bookstore: you can thank him for J.D. Salinger, Wallace Stegner, Ian McEwan and more), announced, with his nose rather high in the air, that he was getting rid of all his books and giving up reading.

I sighed, rather melodramatically, from somewhere deep down in my soul.

What is this world coming to when a girl has to track down her book reviews, hunting bow in hand? I know it's a pretty specialized interest, but honestly, it wasn't this difficult a few months ago--I found all kinds of stuff. But those sites are no longer active.

I heave another dramatic sigh, and take off to review Tolstoy, unaided and alone.