"With all the time and energy you've squandered on that blog, you could have written a book. So goes the self-reproach . . ."
"Many of us have heard that particular nagging voice. But unlike most of us, Caleb Crain—writer of fiction, contributor of nonfiction to the New Yorker and elsewhere, author of the cultural-literary blog Steamboats are Ruining Everything—has responded to it decisively. The result is The Wreck of the Henry Clay: Posts and Essays, 2003-2009, a best-of-Steamboats compendium."
"The frequent New Yorker contributor Caleb Crain, who most recently wrote for the magazine about the Ludlow massacre of 1914, has been making news for his decision to turn his blog posts into a book."
"Neat. Caleb Crain (contributor to n+1, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, etc) has assembled essays originally posted at his blog into a book, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay. Subjects include peak oil, gay marriage, torture, literary criticism and more. Get excited!"
"Even when we discover a great blog, we almost never go back through all of its archives—it just feels like too much trouble. Put those archives between pages, however, and we read differently: the brief posts lose the ephemerality conferred by the structure of the blog, and, at least in the case of Crain's posts, become surprisingly addictive.
"Just flipping through The Wreck of the Henry Clay (and the index, a labor-intensive addition for which I'm grateful) the past few days, I've encountered a host of fascinating facts and anecdotes: that the speed limit in Long Branch, New Jersey was six miles per hour in 1903; that the renowned exotic dancer Lola Montez was a 'dead failure' in her New York debut in the 1850s, because she had too little of 'the nasty' in her gyrations; that the New York Atlas in 1848 posited that two-thirds of the inmates of the state's asylums were the wives of clergymen; that 'there's a limit to the number of sailor's narratives that even the most hardened Melvillean needs to read.' A longer piece about translations of Turgenev sent me to the bookshelf to check the one I'd read, while a note that uses Lytton Strachey's defense of the Earl of Essex in his Elizabeth and Essex to show how far we've fallen in the current torture debates has led me to the library to check out Strachey's book."
"That list of factoids and that final judgment—who knew that hardened Melvilleans even existed?—was my cue to spend several hours reading Crain’s blog. They were hours well-spent."
"I’ve been reading (re-reading, dog-earing, margin scribbling) the book The Wreck of the Henry Clay, which is a collection of wonderfully discursive posts from Caleb Crain's blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. On every other page there is an idea so compelling, an opinion so original, a reference so obscure that I am constantly itching to share it. Frankly, this is one of the most entertaining and informative books I’ve read all year."
"This handsome book-thing will gladly fit into the cargo pockets of khaki shorts, or you can store it in a backpack or just hold it. Also it doesn’t have to be charged or plugged in, though it does require lighting."
"There is scarcely an entry in which one doesn't learn something, no matter how trivial, as well as feel the author's own joy at learning the same thing. Call this the real 'democratic' potential of the blog. One's only credentials are one's seriousness, measured not by tone, rhetoric, or degrees conferred, but by the pains one is willing to take, especially during unsupervised hours."
"I caught myself thinking about buying a second copy “for when the first one wears out.” For those of you keeping score at home, that would be me paying twice for things that can be found, online, for free."
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