I can't quite believe that this is my 500th post. I started the blog 2 1/2 years ago & I never expected to keep going past that first fortnight of my summer holidays. Amazingly, I have kept posting & all of you, the kind visitors who keep commenting & starting conversations, have kept coming back.
I thought I'd celebrate by adapting Simon's idea of
Five from the Archive & post links to five posts that sum up my enthusiasms. They're the posts that have generated interesting discussions rather then the posts with the most hits. Looking through the list, most of the posts with very high numbers of hits have very few comments. Probably because they've been discovered by students looking for information about
Sir Walter Raleigh &
Emily Brontё or people googling terms like
Royal Wedding &
English Ghost!
Persephone is my favourite publisher & I love my collection of Persephones, both dove grey & Classic covers.
This post, for Persephone Reading Weekend, generated a lot of enthusiastic responses - & some jealousy as well!
Book design always creates a fuss, whether we love the design (Persephones, original Virago Modern Classics) or hate it (pastel chick lit covers, headless women on historical novels).
This post was my response to the changing fashions in cover art.
Then there are the books that we all love - well, all of us who love books about books or a particular type of comforting, funny novel that we can read over & over again.
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym is one of those novels.
History is another of my enthusiasms & Josephine Tey's
The Daughter of Time is one of the books that got me started on my obsession with Richard III & English history in general.
I couldn't finish a post about this blog without mentioning
Abby. I was very touched by all the sympathetic comments from Abby's fans when she died in May last year.
Of course, I now have Lucky & Phoebe to keep me company. They're enjoying a beautiful sunny winter's day by sleeping on the back porch after a busy morning of climbing (Phoebe) & exploring (Lucky). I've almost finished reading all the books I was part way through in
this post so it's on with the next 500 posts!
