The Reading Life Review for 2016- Part IV. State of the Blog

Blog Stats for 2016

Since inception The Reading Life has had 4,404, 826 page views

There 2986 posts.  The most posted upon area is Irish Literature

In the last month of the year for the first time ever Indian short stories posts had more readers than those on the Philippines.

During December I had over 30,000 hits from Russian bots.  They would show up 100 plus visits from all over the country in one minute, then gone after being online just a few seconds.  Given Russian hackers being in the news I feared at first a malicious intent.  Now I just see it as part of giant periodic sweep of all the webpages they can find, looking for who knows what.  Please let me know if you have experienced anything like this.

Leaving out the Russians, the top place of origin was the USA, the Philippines, India, the Ukraine and Germany.

Metro Manila is the most common originating city. California the top USA state.

Plans and Hopes for 2017

I hope to complete my read through of Honore de Balzac's La Comedie Humaine.  I expect to complete by readings of the work of Beryl Bainbridge soon.  I plan to read more literary biographies
 in 2017.  My first post in 2017 in this genre will be on Beatrice Potter.

In March I will focus once again on Irish short stories, in July on Paris related works and in November German Literature.

Thanks,

I thank all those who leave comments, all are welcome on my blog, even Russian bots and trump voters! I thank Max u for his kind provision of Amazon gift cards.

Ambrosia will be taking a six months leave of absence to temporarily manage the Bousweau Foundation.

Mel u