The first stop on our inagural blog review is Musings & Wanderings' review of The Hollywood Economist.

We’re doing something special on MobyLives this fall/winter. For the first time ever we’re posting a year-in-review of the titles we’ve published. This will be achieved chronologically (mostly) and daily (hopefully).

This is MobyLives, mind you, and naturally we can’t just do this in a straightforward sort of way. Nor did we want to make this strictly about us. Since MobyLives is about book culture and news (most of the time) we decided to take a unique angle with this series.

With this in mind our annual review will be a blog tour. We will point you to the smaller but worthwhile blogs toiling away out there on the intertubes and in particular the ones who either reviewed or mentioned our books in their posts. This way we get to brag a little about our titles and at the same time inform our readers about some very worthy blogs they may not have heard of.

So let’s get this tour bus rolling.

The first stop? The Hollywood Economist, by Edward Jay Epstein.

You can read what we had to say about the book here, but this about featuring the blogger as well as the book. In this case we chose a blog named Musings and Wanderings and really it was the opening line of their post on Epstein’s book that grabbed us.

If I had to sum up what I learned in this book in a sentence I would say, never invest in a movie.

Ken Smith‘s blog is a diverse affair that concerns itself with movies, books and a healthy dose of college football. So why did we chose a decidedly varied blog that often contains content more akin to journaling than journalism? Well, we chose it because of its authenticity. This is a personal blog, where one person, who happens to be a veteran of the advertising trade, writes short form posts reviewing the media he has consumed, the things he likes in general and well, in some cases, the cheeseburgers consumed.

It is easy to become overly cynical about blogs and bloggers, being that they are not all equal affairs but it is precisely the personal nature and authentic approach that landed Musings and Wanderings on our list. Smith’s review is brief, informative and above all honest.

While certain massive corporations resort to necromancy in order to manufacture comments and posts on blogs it is refreshing to be able to offer up a real live person (even if an ad man) who said nice things about one of our books.

So in order to keep it real, as they used to say, here are links to Musings and Wanderings‘ review of Epstein’s book and the site’s home page.

Tomorrow we look at Dave Thompkins‘ history of the vocoder, How To Wreck A Nice Beach.