It’s been one heck of a year for me, that’s for sure.  Not only did I read and review 260 books, I’ve made so many new friends and discovered so many great new authors I never would have found otherwise.  When I first started my blog, my personal life was chaotic but the daily posting regime has helped me with time management and increased my sense of responsibility.  It’s also made me realize that I absolutely love blogging and will likely be here this time next year.  After all, I have to finish my own reading challenge, don’t I?

Since this is a recap of the entire year, I’m not only going to do my best and worst posts in terms of traffic, but also the most commented, most liked and the ones I think are my best work.  Well, here we go:

The 5 Best Posts (Traffic)

1.  The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (2, 615 hits)

2.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome (2, 467 hits)

3.  Matilda by Roald Dahl (2, 025 hits)

4.  The Giver by Lois Lowry (1, 701 hits)

5.  Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1, 414 hits)

Now, for me this is not all that surprising.  I’ve consistently had search engine traffic for each post and most posts are older posts, which gave an advantage over the other posts that are just now gaining speed.

The 5 Worst Posts (Traffic)

1.  The Lioness and Her Knight by Gerald Morris (1 hit)

2.  Parsifal’s Page by Gerald Morris (1 hit)

3.  The Princess, The Crone and the Dung-Cart Knight by Gerald Morris (1 hit)

4.  The Ballad of Sir Dinadan by Gerald Morris (1 hit)

5.  My Status Update Journey by Marcus Matherne (1 hit)

This is actually both sad and hilarious.  Hilarious because book reviews of the same author are the 4 worst, but sad because Gerald Morris’ Squires Tales series is an amazing series that can be read by children and adults alike.  Also sad is that Marcus Matherne’s book only gathered one hit because it is hilarious and I enjoyed reading it.

The 5 Most Commented on Posts

1.  The Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge

2.  About

3.  I Need Your Help

4.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

5.  What Makes You Stop Reading a Book?

Really, there are no surprises here.  The top posts are either the usual contact/landing pages, ones that specifically asked questions or were particularly clicky.  And by clicky I mean interested lots of people so they shared it and more people than usual saw them.  That was certainly the case for my reading challenge, which now has 40 comments, 13 of which are mine.  I suppose WordPress counts pingbacks as comments because I did get a lot of pingbacks on the post as well.

The 5 Most Liked Posts

1.  Sliding on the Snow Stone by Andy Szpuk

2.  Should Reviewers Give Bad Reviews?

3.  The Library of a Book Reviewer

4.  Things Authors Should Know About Bad Reviews

5.  About

Again, not that surprising.  Andy Szpuk has a devoted following and did a great job publicizing my review of his book.  The rest are again either landing pages or rants, which always gather a lot of traffic in the first week that I post them.

My Personal Favourite Posts

1.  Bullying: An Issue Near and Dear to My Heart

2.  The Portrayal of Cleopatra in Historical Fiction

3.  What Makes You Stop Reading a Book?

4.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

5.  Things Authors Should Know about Bad Reviews

My personal favourite posts are the ones I think were the best written,  required the most effort to write and I was most passionate about.  Of course my bullying article was highly personal, but it felt good to get that off my chest.  My Cleopatra article is one I’m proud of because I did quite a bit of research to write it, even if it never really gathered many hits.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome was really one of my first true ‘articles’ I wrote because not only was it completely original, it was divided into my familiar list format with pictures in between.  I think that helped with search engine traffic so as not to intimidate people who were trying to find information for their homework assignments.

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Well, it’s been an awesome first year here at The Mad Reviewer and 2013 is going to be even better.  One article I’m excited about is my origins post, in which I discuss how I thought of my blog name and why I decided to start blogging.  There will be more author interviews, more rants and hopefully more book reviews as I am aiming for 500 reviews by December 31, 2013.  That means I’ll have to at least review 240  books next year, which I think is easily achievable if I continue at my regular pace.

There’s also my little reading challenge I’m hosting and I am frankly incredibly excited about this.  The response has been enthusiastic to say the least and I’m impressed at how many people are aiming for the higher levels.  Maybe if someone reaches Mad Reviewer early, I’ll add an extra level for a chance at more entries in the draw.

Happy new year folks!  Thank you to my old readers for sticking around so long and welcome to my new readers.  I would not be blogging if it wasn’t for all 178 of you.