Overall, I’d say October was a pretty awesome month for me.  In real life I got to scare children on two separate occasions and read some pretty awesome books.  Blog-wise I’m doing better than ever.  October 2013 has been my second best month of all time in terms of stats.  I have received 6,779 views and that includes 4,416 unique views.  My best month is still September 2012 when I received 6,927 views, but I’m very pleased with my progress.

So what were my best posts this month?  Let’s take a look:

1.  Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal

2.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

3.  The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

4.  Discussion: Blogging Pet Peeves

5.  The Giver by Lois Lowry

As my regular readers know, none of these are new except for my blogging pet peeves discussion post.  So why did I have so many views this month?  Well, looking at the number of hits on the article ‘Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal’ it’s almost six times the number of hits for the #3 slot.  The same goes for my Hunger Games article.  Game of Thrones, both the book series and the TV show, is still wildly popular so there’s no surprise there.  And the Catching Fire movie is coming out soon, so it’s not really all that surprising that that particular article is picking up.  The fact that The Hunger Games is a popular novel study book doesn’t hurt either.

Okay, so the best articles were pretty much my usual ones.  Which were the worst?

1.  Lady of Palenque: Flower of Bacal by Anna Kirwan

2.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

3.  Genghis: Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden

4.  Awful Egyptians by Terry Deary

5.  Extras by Scott Westerfeld

This is the first time any book by Roald Dahl has appeared on my 5 worst list so it’s a landmark month in both the best and worst lists.  The other books are either older novels or were just plain unpopular even when they first came out.  Really, I’m not all that surprised by any of the ones on this list other than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

In the spirit of Halloween, here’s a picture that sums up my most awesome day:

This is at the end of a long 3 or so hours of scaring children.  I swear my hair looked better at the beginning of the local haunted house.  (For those of you that are curious I’m the dumb-looking redneck zombie on the right.  On the left is a bookish friend of mine that’s also a huge fan of The Walking Dead and scaring children.)