Bloggers and Their Books

January 2, 2007

Popular bloggers and newspaper editorial writers share a special conundrum. Both are enjoyed for their ability to provide resonant commentary on current events, but both are also singularly handicapped when it comes to producing books of lasting interest.

I have been thinking about this because of the fact that one of my favorite bloggers, Matthew Yglesias, now and then mentions that he is working on a book. I enjoy his commentary on political events, but muster no excitement about a book from him. There are other blogger/editorialist failures: Andrew Sullivan's Conservative Soul and this new idiocy on liberal fascism by Jonah Goldberg.. and let's not even talk about Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich from the New York Times. It makes no difference what side of the political spectrum a writer is on.. I am claiming that there is something about the job that makes it hard to produce a truly useful book.

What is a useful book? One way to answer that would be to say that it introduces new data into public discussion.. and that in turn means actual research into sources and perspectives not readily available. Books like The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright or Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran may have been written by journalists.. but they are hardly opinion writers. Their accounts become a treasury of hard data for commentators, whose job is to digest all these data-filled works. Likewise academics by nature are adding new data to public discussion, taking up and exploring a subject that would otherwise receive little attention. But commentators are by nature synthesizers and repeaters.. which works fine in a column or a blog, but gets pretty thin when it comes to a book.

Anyways, why does everyone want to do what the other guy is doing? Singers want to act; novelists want to write poems; bloggers want to write books. The crossover into a new genre is always trouble.. and always underestimated.