Welcome!

Welcome to the LPL Book Blog, a source for book recommendations from library staff and, hopefully, library patrons like you. Ideally, a blog gives everyone an opportunity to join the discussion, and if anything invites discussion, it’s books. To comment on our book suggestions or add your own, click on the “Comments” link following each post.

To kick things off, so to speak, here are a few blog-related recommendations:

For the uninitiated, Sarah Boxer’s article on blogs for the New York Review of Books is a good introduction blogs and provides an extensive reading list of books about blogs.

There are around 15 million active blogs. Boxers own book, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, anthologizes 27 of them, providing a sampler of some of the best the web has to offer.

The eye-opening Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq collects the blog entries of a young Iraqi woman written during the first year of American occupation, presenting an underrepresented view of the war in Iraq in a voice that is fervent, frustrated, and darkly comic. Later posts are collected in Baghdad Burning 2. Read reviews and a summary here. The blog is no longer updated.

Julie Powell became a minor celebrity in 2004 when she detailed, on her blog, her quest to conquer all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She reworked many of her posts into the bitingly funny but endearing memoir Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living. Read reviews and a summary here. Julie Powell still keeps a blog at http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/.

Based on the award-winning blog of the same name, Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip: Confessions of a Cynical Waiter distills a Manhattan waiter’s humorous, if admittedly cynical, take on life as a waiter and the insights the job provides into the human psyche. Read reviews and a summary here. The blog can be found at http://www.waiterrant.net/.