Collections of Blog Essays

I’ve been lax on the book reviews lately, dammit, so I’m going to try writing shorter ones to get myself past the mental block.

First two I’m going to hit are collections of blog essays

Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax (A Writer’s Blog) by Alma Alexander1 and That Was the Millenium That Was by John Scalzi.

Before reading these two books, I would have been …skeptical… of reading a collection of blog entries. But I decided to give them a chance, and I was pleasantly surprised.

That Was the Millenium That Was is a series of entries that John Scalzi wrote at the end of the last Millennium that chronicled what he “thought were some of the best, worst and weirdest things of the last millennium.” He released it as a free eBook earlier this year. It’s fascinating to read – not just because Mr. Scalzi is often scathingly funny, but because it’s awesome to see how much has changed in a decade. Despite – or perhaps because of the few dated elements, it’s worth reading.

Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax is a wonderful hodgepodge of essays. Unlike Scalzi’s, they’re not arranged around a particular theme – which makes summarizing them rather difficult. So I’ll use her words: “The essays include more than five years of thoughts and feelings, laughter and tears, triumph and tragedy. I write about rivers, and stars, and dolphins, and cats, and words, and love, and growing up and growing older. In short, shoes and ships and sealing wax.”

Her essays are well written and often quite moving. Definitely worth the low price of admission. Check them both out!

1 Full disclosure: I did the eBook conversion of this text.