Tagged: literature

The Best and Worst of October

Well it hasn’t exactly been a record-smashing month like September was, but in comparing it to my normal stats, everything is up since August.  In October I received 5,421 views, as compared to 4,846 in August.  That’s not bad because I’m only around 1,500 views down from September, which more than makes up the difference Anne Rice’s publicity gave me.  Now let’s look at which articles received the most traffic, shall we?

1.  Matilda by Roald Dahl

2.  The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

3.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

4.  The Giver by Lois Lowry

5.  Ark Angel by Anthony Horowitz

Okay, I completely understand the first four being on the list.  I mean, most of my traffic is from search engines and looking at the search terms makes me suspect it’s mostly kids doing homework for novel study.  But what is with Ark Angel‘s sudden appearance?  There seems to be a resurgence in the now finished Alex Rider series, although I’ll likely never know why.  But why Ark Angel in particular?  It’s the sixth of nine books.

I’ll be puzzling over that for a while, so let’s take a look at the five worst articles in October.

1.  Pretties by Scott Westerfeld

2.  YA News and Upcoming Releases

3.  The Iron Legends by Julie Kagawa

4.  Nefertiti by Michelle Moran

5.  Genghis: Bones of the Hills by Conn Iggulden

Okay, I can see ‘YA News and Upcoming Releases’ placing on here.  I wrote it ages ago and those kinds of articles don’t age well.  However, what is with Julie Kagawa’s Iron Legends anthology placing on the worst list?  Has all the hype for it died down now that The Lost Prince has been released?  Who knows?  The good thing is that while the best articles seem to be consistent, the worst articles seem to rotate.  Well, except for ‘YA News and Upcoming Releases’.

So how was October for everyone?  Stats-wise and life-wise.

The Library of a Book Reviewer

I’ve mentioned my library a few times in the past, but I figure I might as well show you what I’m talking about.  So here is a picture of my family library:

It doesn’t look like all that much, but the room is at such a weird angle that I couldn’t fit everything in the picture.  There’s about four generations of books going back around 100 years in that little library, which also doubles as a guest room.  Apparently someone in my family loved both Dickens and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books because they seem to take up a lot of space.  And if you’re wondering, no, my books aren’t down here.  My personal collection is much, much smaller.

It’s hard to tell from this angle, but that’s the only way I could get the whole shelf in.  As you can tell, there’s a lot of series and they’re all nicely arranged by alphabetical order.  I may be an extremely messy person normally, but I’m obsessed with order when it comes to my books.  However, if you zoom in you can tell this shelf only goes up to ‘M’ in the alphabet.  That’s because there’s another shelf:

Yes, I am obviously running out of room.  The next time I get any new books I’m either going to have to give some more books to my little sister to make room or start clearing myself a shelf in the family library.  No, I don’t know how many books I actually own, but they’re a tiny fraction of what I’ve actually read.

Enough about my library, though..  What does yours look like?

Blog Tour

Well, I’m doing my first blog tour!  Well, technically it isn’t even my tour.  As part of his mission to promote indie and self-published authors, Mark of The Masquerade Crew has reached out to other bloggers to get the word out about a certain number of books.  Those of us that post for his tour will get a chance to win an Amazon gift card and our readers will get the chance to learn about great indie books they never may have heard of before.

Tomorrow I will be posting my first tour article, but I want to ask you guys: Do you want me to do blog tours?  Please post your answer and reasons in the comments section.  If the general consensus is no, I won’t go any further on the tour, but if you guys like blog tours I will keep going with it.

Guest Post Tomorrow

Yes, I know it’s sort of sudden, but I finally got around to organizing my life.  Tomorrow author Lynne Thompson is posting a guest review.  It’s not a series I would ever pick up, so it’s great that Lynne is reviewing the series.

Speaking of organizing my life, I finally updated the ‘My Reviews’ and ‘Guests’ page.  Now I know I have had 12 guest posts and 219 book reviews.  And if you haven’t already seen, I updated my commenting policy as well as my biography on my about page.  Yes, I finally thought of some interesting things I’ve done in my life.  It only took 9 months!

Guest Posting Today

Well, it’s Friday and that means I’m guest posting over at 20four12, seeing as Caleb posted for me last Friday.  Today I actually did a review because I’m trying to get back in the swing of things after publishing a week of articles.  Prisoner of Dieppe by Hugh Brewster is part of the I Am Canada ‘diary’ series aimed at teenage boys.  It is one of the few historical fiction books that has actually be looked over by an historian for accuracy as well, so you know it’s good!  Go on and check it out.