Third Edition: Telling It Like It Is

One of the many things I appreciate about bloggers is the way that they use their voice and their opinions for the enlightenment and entertainment of the community. The mainstream media seems to indulge a tendency to become either shrieky and hysterical or else bullying and cynical these days, and that’s not what I want to read. Bloggers give me hope that you can write something based on opinion or experience and do so in an intelligent and reflective manner, or else with coruscating humour.

The focus of this issue is not on creative writing, but I couldn’t resist beginning with a poem. Becoming Amethyst wrote such a delightfully dark, tender and sexy one about desire, which I felt was a topic to which we could all relate, one way or another.

Next up is Natalia Antonova’s wonderful tribute to two actors we tragically lost this week. No prurient postmortems, no prying, no sentimentality here; instead a beautifully written meditation on what these celebrities mean in our lives.

Think Buddha is a new blog to me, but I very much appreciated the author’s accessible style and profound understanding of what we might call the philosophy of living. In this post he considers Epicureans and Stoics and thinks about what we are doing when we read their doctrines. I’m on tenterhooks now to find out how his class got on with deprivation.

I’m always on the lookout for fantastic book reviews, and the winner for real class this fortnight had to be the formidable Mark Thwaite, who is such a powerful force in literary blogging on the net. In this post he combines an excellent review with his intriguing thoughts on the visibility of the author’s hand in the writing.

A wonderful new, distinctive voice I’ve recently been following is Jew Eat Yet?, another blogger who manages to sustain an impressive level of quality in his posts. I urge you to visit the site as I had a hard time choosing which one to crosspost here. But in the end I went for his account of watching two post-apocalyptic cinematic blockbusters. I just loved it; enough said.

The Existence Machine is another blog that is stunning in its wisdom and intelligence. Another hard choice for me, but this time I went with a complex, detailed meditation on the art of writing via the author’s thoughts on Proust. I thought it was worthy of Proust himself.

If you like your humour black and bitter you’ll love The airport diaries, a scathingly hilarious account of being an ex-cog in the commercial wheel. If Sisyphus had had a sense of humour and access to a keyboard, he might have written like this.

Finally, one of my favourite blogs, The Public, The Private and Everything In Between, on the joys and despairs of sitting around in airport lounges waiting for delayed flights. This is one blogger who manages to write just so delectably well on the everyday, and is brilliant at transforming the ordinary occasions of life into something extraordinary.

I hope you enjoy the blogging feast on offer. Please, please do send in further suggestions for blogs and posts. I can’t do this without your continued and much valued support.