How to Properly Turn Your Blog Into a Book
A Review of ‘The Book of Jezebel’
Spawning a book from a successful blog is probably a treacherous endeavor. How do you appropriately transfer the qualities that make your website a charismatic hit into a book whose content never changes post-publication?
Jezebel, the feminist face of the Gawker media empire, decided to undertake this challenge and do so basically for fun, so says founding editor Anna Holmes in the introduction to The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things. The book successfully captures much of its digital progenitor’s persona. It remains equal parts classy and absurd, funny and trenchant, political and superficial, though at times the blurby quality of the encyclopedia format becomes a bit stifling.
The book is at its best when it is doing one of two things: educating or quipping. In regards to the former, I’m shocked and pleased at how much I learned perusing this compendium of notable women-related stuff. You might seriously fault me—I already do—for being able to make it to my mid-twenties without knowing about some of these people (Elizabeth Blackwell, Fannie Lou Hamer, Anna May Wong, the Albanian sworn virgins) and some of these facts (The Daily Show was created by two women!), but I know them now because of Holmes and her crew.
Meanwhile, the quipping reminds readers that, yep, this is the product of a bunch of bloggers writing a book. While the majority of the book is funny, the best gags are the acerbic one-liners, in which our biblical friend Adam goes down as an “inchoately sexed mudperson” and the religious right gets defined as “folks who want government so small, it can fit in a uterus.” I definitely snort-laughed several times while reading, which, in The Book of Lex, is one of the highest forms of flattery, normally reserved for watching clips of Amy Poehler, who Jezebel accurately describes as “actress, producer, comedienne, activist, and everything that is good and right in the world.”
The jokes sit cozily with Jezebel’s politics. Subjects such as women’s health, LGBT rights, physical appearance, and all the other depressing battles that women typically lose are deftly presented in such a way that you do not feel sapped of all joy by the end of a skim-through. Check out the Letter I’s section, which is, for whatever reason, jammed with grand and easily-politicized concepts (image, inappropriate, indulge, inhibitions, injustice, innocence, just to name a few). Holmes and her contributors take their share of humorous jabs, thus lightening the proverbial mood, but it’s all in the service of critiquing our many flawed social systems.
Ultimately, my one gripe about The Book of Jezebel has to do with its format. As I read through each entry, I sometimes felt bewildered by the condensing of complex topics and personalities, which would have received multiple posts on the website itself, into flattened, easily digestible bites. For example, the Lindsay Lohan entry consists of just a mugshot. It’s funny, but they’ve provided more dynamic coverage of her antics on the site.
Of course, that’s what an encyclopedia is — a reference that delineates the basics, the essence, the things-you-need-to-know-above-all-else. So in that sense, The Book of Jezebel is spot on.
But was it what I was expecting as a long-time reader of Jezebel? Not really. In this world of plentiful online content, the one clear benefit a dead-tree book offers over a website is the opportunity to really burrow into a topic and dissect it thoroughly. Certainly you can do that on a blog as well, but you risk falling into the land of TL;DR. I’m a little surprised that Jezebel decided to take the book opportunity in the other direction, choosing breadth of topics over depth.
That being said, the compression factor does work in the book’s favor as a coffee table offering. Much like its more traditional encyclopedia forebears, The Book of Jezebel is not meant to be read in its entirety in one sitting, or maybe ever. Leave it in your living room or in the suede pouch of reading materials by the couch, and pick it up whenever you crave a small dose of lady-related smarts and skepticism. You don’t have to engage with lengthy treatises or comment sections here: just bare-bones fact and opinion.
I’ll leave you with the final entry in the book, a one-liner definition that encapsulates the pointedly snarky, subversively intelligent, and overtly political viscera of The Book of Jezebel:
zygote: Too young to be a slut, so way more entitled to civil rights than you are.
The Book of Jezebel, written by Kate Harding and Amanda Hess and edited by Anna Holmes, will be available via Grand Central Publishing on October 22.
