A-Z Reflections

My challenge was to share a book review for every letter of the alphabet. I'm happy to say I succeeded.

1.  Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen
2. Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey
3. Call of the Wild by Jack London
4. Defending Jacob by William Landay
5. Eragon by Christopher Paolini
6. Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
7. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimen 
8. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
9. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
10. Jaws by Peter Benchley
11. Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
12. Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist
13. Mongoliad by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo...And others.
14. The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern
15. Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire
16. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth
17. The Next Queen of Heaven by Gregory Maguire
18. The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
19. The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
20. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
21. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
22. Vicious by VE Schwab
23. Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
24. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
25. The Yard by Alex Grecian
26. Zodiac Station by Tom Harper

(links redirect to my blog posts)

I don't really know what I want to say. 26 posts later and I find myself a little blogged out. I did it. The last time I did it was 2015 and I think it's pretty cool that I've had this blog all that time. I guess I got into it this time around because I wanted to generate a little more traffic to my blog, which, as it turns out, is the wrong reason for me to be blogging. I simply can't compete with April. I do four reviews a month if that, a handful of book blog memes sometimes, one of which the inventor is no longer hosting. So why am I even bothering?

Because I can. I like to write. I like to read. I like to write about what I've been reading. While an additional 500 followers, most of whom are prolific commentors, would be nice, the reality is it might not be necessary. I couldn't even keep up with answering the reviews from the handful of people who were kind enough to comment, although I read and appreciated each and every one of them.

I was wowed by the creativity involved. The sheer variety of blogs and the number of themes people had designed kept me entertained. There were blogs about books, photography, gardening, genetic histories, writing, and coping with loss... But I don't have to tell you, They're yours. I found plenty of new reading material both in book recommendations and new blogs to follow so I'm pretty excited about that. 

Many bloggers had their comments area well-hidden or restricted to those with a specific sign in options, so some of those I visited didn't even know I was there :-( Some had blogs that were too difficult to navigate, or even to complex to load on my computer... 

Compared to some, my blog is simple. The layout is simple, the content is simple, hell, maybe even the author is simple. And yet... I'm happy with it.

Also I'm teaching myself to use Excel since I need it for work and I came up with this nifty pie chart to track my genres for this year's challenge. Fantasy and Horror are in the lead, with Science Fiction a close second, and the rest wishing they were that cool.

You might think this pie chart was a ridiculous use of time and I agree. But there it is anyways.

What's left to say, but: Thank you. Thank you for visiting, thank you for your comments, thank you for all the reading material. And as always, thank you for your support.