Ten Year Anniversary Special: By the numbers

We're celebrating the blog's ten year anniversary all month long, and this week we're taking a look at some raw numbers. Last week's anniversary post was timed to go live to the day on the ten year anniversary of the very first post on "A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews." But ten years today the first reviews were posted to the blog!

I took a look at some raw data recently to tally up the number of posts and reviews broken down by format. Content posted up to September 5, 2017, was included in the tallies. There were also a few posts that were single posts that contained reviews for two different titles. In these cases each of those reviews was tallied separately for the review numbers. So if you add up reviews, and it comes to a couple more than the total number of posts, this is why. Now. Let's take a look at the numbers!

Over the past ten years this blog has posted 422 posts. More recently I've made an effort to post a new review once a week. Sometimes there were two posts a week if I had content for a review as well as for a miscellaneous, non-review post.

What does this mean in terms of reviews by format or miscellaneous posts? It means hundreds of book reviews have been posted to the blog! 325 book reviews have been posted in a wide range of genres, including adult fiction, young adult fiction, juvenile fiction, non-fiction, and picturebooks. While the majority of the reviews have been of adult fiction books primarily in the genres thrillers/mysteries, "chick" lit, historical fiction, and literary fiction written by me (Ms. Angie), I have also reviewed some young adult fiction, juvenile fiction, and picturebook titles.

Over the years I've also welcomed at least three guest reviewers, the most recent of which is Miss Shayne who has been posting reviews for young adult fiction and movies fairly regularly over her school breaks. Other genres reviewed by me or other guest reviewers have included non-fiction, biographies, memoirs, and Christian fiction. There's an archive you can use to find past reviews going all the way back ten years by clicking the burger menu near the top right corner. Or you can search by title, author, or genre tag using the search function next to the burger menu.

Reviews for 58 movies, mini-series, and/or TV shows, reviewed by either me or Miss Shayne, have posted to the blog these past ten years as well as reviews for four music CD's. And there have been 37 miscellaneous posts. What's a miscellaneous post? While the past few years have focused nearly exclusively on content that reviews a title, earlier in the blog's life I also posted new arrivals lists of new titles in one of several of the library's collections. These miscellaneous posts also included links to other content posted to the library's Youtube channel as well as the Staff Picks posts that shared staff members' best of or favorite titles from the previous year. The Staff Picks series started in 2014 and will be in its fourth year this year!

Next week we'll take a closer look at some of reviews that have received a lot attention over the past ten years. And don't forget to hit us up in the comments! We love to hear from our readers.

--Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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