May 24, 2005

Blogging Baghdad

Okay, this is a shameless (tho' cited!) steal from Booklist.

Booklist had an interesting article recently called "Blogs over Baghdad" (4/1/2005, p. 1339, if you're curious), discussing the increasingly popular phenomenon of blogs-into-books. The article (as you might guess from the title) highlights blogs written by native Iraqis (you know, going about their lives in the midst of a war and writing about it for all the world to read, same as anyone), but they snuck a cooking blog in there, too, just to confuse people. Although there are those who will downplay the value of blogs and bloggers for any number of reasons-- lack of editorial control, dubious journalistic integrity, downright bad writing-- many American publishing companies have been taking an interest in bloggers and have started soliciting them for books (heck, they already *have* a writing sample, after all...).

Booklist talks about three in particular that have spawned books, and (happily) provides the addresses for their blogs also. So, here we go: three blogs, and the books based on them:

blog: Where Is Raed?
book: Salam Pax, Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi (Oct. 2003)

blog: Baghdad Burning
book: Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (Apr. 2005)

blog: The Julie/Julia Project
book: Julie Powell, Julie and Julia (due out Sept. 2005)

Posted by gris at May 24, 2005 04:53 PM