Brilliant Blogs

You may notice I updated the sidebar with a few new blogs recently. Highlights include:

• AustenBlog -- run by the famous (in online Austen circles) Mags of pemberley.com and Tilneys and Trapdoors, this blog tracks Jane Austen, her works, and related projects in non-scholarly articles on the Internet.
• Read Roger -- the blog of Roger Sutton, the editor of the Horn Book. He was on the Germany trip with me last year, and he's funny, smart, courteous, and fond of being provocative, so always interesting to read.
• Jennifer Crusie's Argh Ink -- Jennifer Crusie is by far my favorite romance novelist writing today: unique characters with strange but realistic obsessions (e.g., Sophie in "Welcome to Temptation" speaks half the time in movie quotes); interesting plots; whip-smart, bullet-fast, and funny-as-hell dialogue; even her sex scenes are fresh and hot, and in romance fiction, that's saying something. Her blog here shows that *she's* a unique character who's also whip-smart, fresh, and funny as hell. I unequivocally and without shame recommend her books to all of you.
• Voucher Ankles -- I forget where the title of this blog comes from, but it belongs to the actor James Urbaniak, who judging from his writing here is highly literate and amusing. Introduced to me by Ben.

I also read but did not include on the sidebar:

• PostSecrets -- This is an amazing art site (introduced to me by Lisa) where people send in their secrets on homemade postcards. The art is beautiful and disturbing, and many people have apparently found it therapeutic; but I confess I also find it the slightest bit creepy -- I know I'm being voyeuristic when I read it, wanting to find out other people's secrets even if I don't know who they are. Still, fascinating.
• Grow Some Testicles -- Um. This is one of multiple blogs on which various single New Yorkers track their dating lives, complete with reprinting verbatim IMs/e-mails/text messages from the people with whom they're involved or would like to be involved. This seems like a dangerous idea to me, since New York is the biggest Small World in the world (I randomly met a guy the other day who designs the album art for Harry and the Potters -- how strange is that?), but again deliciously voyeuristic to read.
• Veiled Conceit -- The ultimate goal of Grow Some Testicles? Ending up in the New York TImes' Vows column, where you could be snarked by this guy for your preciousness and pretentiousness. Rarely updated, but very funny when it is. (Gacked from Jimmy's LJ.)
• Sarah Dessen -- Sarah Dessen writes YA fiction about smart, complicated, organized girls who find their lives becoming more complicated and less organized. She also teaches at the UNC-Chapel Hill, watches a lot of TV, and writes long blog posts every day, so I would hate her for being *so* smart and *so* organized if she didn't confess that half that TV was "American Idol."

And one more shout-out here for Jeremiah's Five Bucks to Friday, whose characters just keep getting richer, funnier, and more complicated and real.

Go forth and procrastinate.