Posted by Jason Diamond

Pretty simple formula:  your favorite television characters imagined as people who sit behind their laptops and blog about books.  

Stefon 

Did you know Stefon was a huge reader?  Apparently he wrote a really great piece on Nicholson Baker a few months back.  He also holds court discussing new works at New York’s hottest club, Portnoy’s Liver.  Apparently this place has everything: Spud Webb riding a donkey, fresh off the boat Russian immigrants, tweekers, candy ravers, body builders dressed like penguins…

Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

What his personal blog mostly concentrates on: pointing out inaccuracies in popular vampire fiction, and talking shit about the people who come into his library. He did enjoy Colson Whitehead’s Zone One quite a bit, and dedicated a few posts to discussing it.  Zombie books are alright with him.

Clarissa Darling from Clarissa Explains It All

Clarissa’s award-winning memoir Me and the Boy in My Window–which chronicled her friendship, love affair, and then the eventual unexplained disappearance of her friend Sam Anders–was so popular that Clarissa doesn’t really have to blog if she doesn’t want to.  But even with all her success, she does find time to contribute occasional posts to Rookie, and has had a few pieces on the McSweeney’s site as well.  She has a lot of Twitter conversations with Emma Straub, and has been working on her first real novel for about a decade now.

Roman DeBeers from Party Down

Roman’s blog isn’t that popular, mostly 3000-word screeds about “hard sci-fi.”  He also has a weird love/hate obsession with Lev Grossman, and usually has a Game of Thrones recap which is basically just him talking about how hot the girl who plays Khalisi is.

Liz Lemon from 30 Rock

Liz doesn’t technically have a lit blog, she has a Tumblr called “Spinster or Hipster?”  Nobody knows that she’s the one behind it, but it’s really popular, and most of the people she puts on it dress like librarians, famous 60s intellectuals (both from the Right and Left), Woody Allen, or younger versions of Cynthia Ozick. So we figured it fit well here.

Spike from Degrassi Junior High

Don’t want to toot our own horn here, but Spike would either contribute to Vol. 1, or she’d have a blog very similar to it.  She’d probably write a lot about stuff related to Richard Nash, punk zines from the 90s, Sara Marcus, and Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy.

Dr. George Huang from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

In the rare event that he isn’t helping Benson and Stabler get into the mind of a serial rapist, Dr. George Huang really enjoys writing really incredibly long blog posts about “neuronovels” like John Wray’s Lowboy, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, and finds Blake Butler “fascinating.”  He usually blogs (at best) once a month.

Carlton Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Even though his mentor, the late William F. Buckley, said that he “is like an insufferable lost puppy dog,” Carlton Banks was “good for appearances” so the former Princeton graduate was let into the inner circle.  Before Buckley’s death in 2008, Carlton was given a job writing about books for the National Review, and has since gone on and started a popular blog called “The Right Man Reads.”  Popular guest contributors include Banks’ friends Alex P. Keaton, Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for General Electric Jack Donaghy, and Hank Hill.

Daria Morgendorffer

Daria got out of high school and wrote a bestselling novel in the 90s before the end of her freshman year of college.  The New York Times said it was “the Less Than Zero for the Cobain Generation,” and every other important magazine and newspaper pretty much agreed.  After that she had a hard time producing an adequate followup in terms of critical acclaim, but the old fans are loyal and buy all of her books, and she’s adjunct now at Sarah Lawrence.  She realizes she can pretty much coast on all that success, but that would be lame, and she was never really in it for the fame or money.  When there’s time she contributes to sites like The Rumpus or Salon, and always does a Year in Reading piece for The Millions.  She also shows up to a lot of benefits for 826NYC.

Jessie Spano from Saved by the Bell

Jessie keeps a blog as a hobby.  It’s mostly to discuss books she reads, and how they relate to her fight against caffeine pill addiction.  She points out in nearly every post that Moby-Dick saved her life when she realized that, “Captain Ahab was also so excited.  He was so excited to catch that white whale.  Look what happened to him.”  She also used to run a LiveJournal community dedicated to Douglas Coupland in the early 00s called “Coup-Land.”

Uncle Joey from Full House

To the surprise of everybody, Uncle Joey never made it big as a comedian.  Instead his big break came when he started writing Y.A. novels under a pen name.  After the series was turned into a popular movie franchise, Joey began to fashion himself as a serious writer and critic, and convinced a major magazine to let him write a weekly “things I read” type of column on their struggling blog that they’re hoping will one day be the foundation of the publication.

Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls

Stories in The New Yorker, a piece on This American Life, a really respected N+1 essay about South American exile poetry and it’s socio-economic importance on a global level (who knew?), and a 3-book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux:  Rory is possibly one of the most respected young intellectuals of her generation, but she still finds time to update literary tidbits on her personal blog even though she’s got a weekly column in a major newspaper.

Cousin Balki from Perfect Strangers

Fascinated by the last decade’s overflow of Eastern European American immigrant literature, Cousin Balki decided that a fictional story about a shepherd from the island of Mypos moving to America, and the crazy hijinks that ensue would be the next big thing.  Sadly, the book sucked, and nobody knew where the hell Mypos was on a map.  Crushed, Balki threw the book into the fireplace, and focused his time on blogging about immigrant fiction that he saw as beneath his own book.  People said he changed.  He stopped talking to Cousin Larry, and got a job at a Kinkos so he could sit on the internet for free, where he calls out his Chicago neighbor, Aleksandar Hemon, and badgers Gary Shteyngart on Twitter.  He constantly uses the term “Mypos Diaspora,” and has made himself something of a pariah for his brash style.  Any chance of getting his book published is now long gone.

Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation

You really think Ron Swanson has a blog?  He doesn’t.  Sorry.

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