It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.
Email is so well designed, so resilient, and so ubiquitous that's very hard to displace it's use as a central check-in.
Right which is why I'd only suggest the browser as an alternative. Imho a browser is something I open when I proactively am seeking information/entertainment and thereby fits blog reading better than email which is more like an interrupt.
Maybe the default "new tab" view for a browser could be an RSS reader? Is that something along the lines of what you're proposing?
I want very badly to use RSS to read everything, and I still use RSS a lot. But I have to admit that email won the resiliency battle a long time ago.