16 years of blogging

16^th Blogiversary

On Tuesday, Tuesday, 5 October 2010, I started this blog.

In the meantime, I have had 6572575 views, 87 followers, 3089 posts and 16400 comments.

My very first post was about my favourite author, Jane Austen, of course: Which Austen Heroine are You? At the time, I thought I might be Anne Elliot but it turned out I was Elinor Dashwood which I am convinced now is the more correct choice.

My lastest post from Saturday, Six Degrees of Separation ~ Life of M, has had 38 views so far.

And because not all of my reader friends speak English, I started a second blog on 30 October 2012: Mariannes Bücherecke/Der Bücherwurm (Marianne's Book Corner/The Book Worm). And though I didn't start all blogging all my books there immediately, I have had 1473 posts in the meantime and 353865 views.

I have always enjoyed sharing the books I read with fellow readers and I hope to do so for a long, long time.

Thank you to everyone who shares this passion with me and who contributes to my blog.

You can find more information under Statistics.

Blogger Problems

If you haven't received any comments from me lately, it's because Blogger has had problems for more than a week. I don't get any notifications of posts from the blogs I follow. I hope you get some about me but if not, I am very sorry. I cannot believe that Blogger cannot fix this kind of problem within a day or two. Let's hope they get on their feet soon.

Happy November!

 Happy November to all my Friends and Readers
New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch
"The Old Svaneke Lighthouse - Bornholm"
"Svaneke Gamle Fyr - Bornholm"

Frank says to this picture:
"Das Dänemark Aquarell präsentiert den Leuchtturm in einer typischen Landschaft an der Ostsee im ausklingenden Herbst."
"The Denmark watercolor presents the lighthouse in a typical landscape on the Baltic Sea in the late autumn." 

It's always lovely to see a picture with a lighthouse. I love lighthouses. You can see this in my list:
Top Ten Tuesday ~ Lighthouses

When we took our boat tour last month, they had a cute little decoration with a lighthouse there, I just had to take a picture and hope you like it as much as I do.

Read more on their website here. *

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And October was again a special month. I celebrated my 15 year blogiversary on the 5^th of the month. For a wedding that would be crystal.

My very first post on October, 5, 2010 was:
Which Austen Heroine are you? I found out that I am Elinor Dashwood. While I always thought I might be Anne Eliot, I can see how Elinor came about. 
If you are interested, who you are supposed to be, there is a link on my page. Let me know, if you've done the test.

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For our Jane Austen read (see #Reading Austen project) this month, I found a book about Janes Austen's time. And it was a very interesting and detailed book about all the little things we don't know anything about:
Adkins, Roy & Lesley "Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England: How our ancestors lived two centuries ago" (aka "Jane Austen's England) - 2013

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And here we have another German expression that fits everywhere but since the colder time of the year is beginning, we might wear slippers sometimes and that's what made me think of this word:

Pantoffelheld

The German word "Pantoffel" means slipper, "Held" is a hero, so a slipper hero. But we are talking about something very different from a hero. It's a man who allows himself to be controlled by his wife and who has no say at home. Of course, in former time that was really bad, nowadays older people often use it for modern men who "help" at home. And that's just ridiculous, it's his home as well as hers, why should she carry all the burden especially sind most women work for their money today, as well.

Anyway, the English expression would be hen-pecked. Do you know of similar expressions in other languages?

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* You can also have a look under my labels Artist: Frank Koebsch and Artist: Hanka Koebsch where you can find all my posts about the two artists. 

🎃 I wish you all a very Happy November! 🎃

Twelve Years of Blogging

12^th "Blogiversary"

It's a special day today. At least for me. Twelve years ago, I started this blog.

Twelve is a good number. We have twelve months in the year and two times twelve hours in a day. We also have twelve signs in the zodiac, in the Western as well as in the Chinese one. In mathematics, it's a so-called composite number, the smallest number with exactly six divisors, its divisors being 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12. In the British imperial and monetary system, everything was either divisible by twelve or by twenty (e.g. 12 inches in a foot). We even have an extra word for twelve in most languages: a dozen. In most religions, it has a very symbolical value (see 12 apostles, 12 sons of Abraham, 12 days of Christmas).

Last year, I presented you with the number of entries I had in certain genres and here is an update:
Classics (369 as opposed to 329 last year), Nobel Prize Winners (128), Lists (192), Book Club (225). And I have found many other things to blog about over the years, Book Quotes (353 quotes), Top Ten Tuesday once a week (141 weeks by now) and new challenges all the time, the Classics Club, Spell the Month in Books, Six Degrees of Separation, Read the Year, Travel the World Through Books etc. I haven't started any other new reading challenges this year because I really need to "work on" my TBR pile. However, I started to add books to my German blog here.

See last year's blogiversary post.

Eleven Years of Blogging

11^th "Blogiversary"

It's a special day today. At least for me. Eleven years ago, I started this blog.

Eleven is a prime number. Its twin is the next prime number, 13. It has a lot of meanings.
Armistice on WWI was declared on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" 1918. This is still the time and date it is commemorated today.

Apollo 11 was the first rocket to land on the moon. There are eleven players on a football field. In chemistry, it's the atomic number for sodium.
Apparently, according to the know-it-all WWW, the number eleven is a master number in numerology. It is a double digit of the number one which stands for beginnings and purity and the meaning of the prime number doubles its strength. The number eleven also stands for balance and represents male and female, sun and moon. That is interesting because my star sign is the libra which also balances everything. So - perfect. Not that I really believe in this but it's always interesting to read what people have been coming up with.

My very first entry was about Jane Austen. "Which Austen Heroine are You?" (apparently, I'm Elinor Dashwood), followed by a list of my Favourite Books Ever. I carried on with a list about our Book Club History, right after that a post about the Nobel Prize for Literature winner of 2010 (Maria Vargas Llosa), which was then followed by a post about my favourite book ever, "The Children's War". I have, of course, updated all those lists over the time.

I think this shows how I play with my blog. I love Classics (329 posts so far), Nobel Prize Winners (121), Lists (149), I have been a member of a Book Club for decades (198), Book Quotes, Top Ten Tuesday (193) challenges, the Classics Club (39) and the Classics Challenge 2021, Spell the Month in Books, Six Degrees of Separation etc. And I Travel the World Through Books. This is only a smidgen of the topics I blog about but I hope I have given a quick overview.

I have found many other enthusiastic readers here whose blogs I love to read and who come to my blog and comment on our issues. I found many, many interesting books that way, and had lots of fascinating conversations.

So, thank you all for your support. I look forward to the next couple of years of living in the blogging world.