As much as I value the Internet, it's clear that it occasionally does something funny to peoples' brains when it comes to reading and writing. Earlier this week the Globe & Mail reported on a new site called Smashwords, where aspiring writers can upload their works and decide how much to charge readers for it. Mark Coker, head of the company, says that his dream is that "someday, some aspiring author who lives in a hut in Tanzania, and who has to travel 3 hours by bus to the nearest town with an Internet terminal, publishes a breakout book on Smashwords and touches millions of people. How cool would that be?"

Pretty cool, I suppose, if wildly unrealistic. (Though wouldn't you know it, there's a travel guide to Tanzania available on the site for $4.) Both the anonymous author and Smashwords speak to a legitimate frustration among writers, and in some ways it's an ages-old problem: There are a lot of people who want to get their words out in front of people, they're tired of getting nowhere with the publishing establishment, and they want to feel like they're getting some cash for their efforts. If the advent of print-on-demand sites like Lulu has taught us anything, it's that there's an ocean of people out there who feel like they have something crucial and affecting to say. Smashwords isn't doing something as onerous as vanity publishing, where authors pay to have their own books published, but it Coker's...

I recently made a decision: I'm no longer calling blogs "excellent."

For the few years I've been blogging, either personally or professionally, I've had a habit of referring to my favorite blogs with the "excellent" qualifier. The excellent litblog The Elegant Variation; the excellent Silicon Valley blog Valleywag; the excellent music blog Soul Sides. As I wrote those lines, I figured that I was adding an important adjective---after all, as a critic it's important to give voice to your enthusiasms. But I've now come to realize that those "excellents" were a defensive posture---a journalist's way of saying, "Pretty good---for a blog." I mean, I wouldn't call the New York Times an "excellent" newspaper or the New York Review of Books an "excellent" literary journal. The fact that they are much-cited publications reflects their importance, and the same goes for blogs.

I bring this up in relation to an interesting piece that's recently gone up at the Web site for Granta (which you probably don't need to be told is also a very excellent literary journal). For "The Web Habits of Highly Effective People," Granta editors quizzed various literary personages for their lists of favorite Web sites. It's a fairly diverse list of people---editors, agents, novelists, bloggers---but what surprised me is how relatively surprise-free the lists are. Culturally, we've begun to settle into a familiar media diet; everybody who's a serious reader takes in the major media outlets, along with a supplement of major blogs and social networking...

There's a fantasy in many aspiring writers' minds that writing is a solitary business. You might be imagining a quiet room in the country, with a desk before a picture window revealing carpets of outdoor greenery; or maybe a cramped but cheap garret above the bustle of the city, as you scribble intently in notebooks. Truth is, writers need to network. That can mean cocktail parties among journalists or nuts-and-bolts critique sessions, but in any case meeting other writers is essential---after all, at some point you'll want to convince somebody that you're worth publishing, and being able to make a case for yourself (or, better still, having somebody making that case on your behalf) will mean a lot.

Not all networks are created equal, though, and I confess I have a fair bit of skepticism about Authonomy, a new social-networking site a la Facebook that's now in beta. Authonomy---let's set aside the awful name for now, shall we?---is a product of publisher HarperCollins UK. According to a story on the Web site Social Media Portal, it's designed to allow aspiring writers to upload up to 10,000 words of their manuscript, connect with other writers, and perhaps, Authonomy hints, get a big publisher's attention.

Because it's still in beta, I haven't had a chance to look into what's on offer there. On a related blog, Authonomy's makers address some legal concerns---writers preserve the copyright to their work, we're assured. But, as one wise commenter points out, the blog is...

Everybody who's worked at a publication knows that the best way to start arguments with readers is to make a list---it's why music magazines rarely go more than a couple of issues without creating one. It's as true with books as it is with records, as the New York Times learned a couple years back when it compiled a list of the best works of American fiction of the past 25 years. The forum for discussing that list has apparently disappeared but I recall the contentiousness of the argument---the common complaint was that it was a surprise-free list that boosted familiar names (Toni Morrison, John Updike, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy). Where are the independent presses?, people wanted to know. Why indulge in such an enterprise if it's only going to tighten the bolts on these writers' pedestals?

This argument flared up again this week, as the National Book Critics Circle published the latest edition of Good Reads---its seasonal list of recommended books among its membership. Looking at the fiction list alone is to see books from major houses (Knopf, Viking, FSG) and two list-toppers (Richard Price and Jhumpa Lahiri) whose latest books have received reams of positive notices. "This list represents many people, not thinking, in unison," griped one anonymous commenter.

I'm an NBCC member, but I have no involvement in Good Reads except to submit my recommendations. (This time I went with Rudolph Wurlitzer's new novel, The Drop Edge of...

In the past month or so a host of stories have cropped up about the bank BB&T financing college courses that feature books by Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Inside Higher Ed, a Web site covering academia, had one of the earliest pieces, reporting on Marshall University business school's acceptance of a $1 million grant from the BB&T Foundation, with the condition that Atlas Shrugged would be included in a lecture series and in an upper-level course; NPR reports today that 25 colleges and university have taken money from BB&T since 2005 to feature Rand's objectivist philosophy in its courses.

I claim no strong feelings about Rand's work---I read The Fountainhead when I was in high school, and I plowed far enough into Atlas Shrugged to know that sticking with it would mean hopping a train moving too slow for my temperament. Its doctrine of unfettered capitalism lashed to severe individualism is fine by me, which is to say I think it's harmless. By and large I think that Ayn Rand is a mistake you make when you're young, and part of growing up is embracing philosophies that ultimately can't bear the weight of life as it's actually lived. (When I was 13 I figured that there was no aspect of human behavior that couldn't be explained by No Exit and Pink Floyd's The Wall. Thank goodness I wasn't blogging then.) But BB&T efforts do bother me, and the reason for that...