The 6-year anniversary of this blog - and the 5 most-popular posts on elliotsreading

Today marks the first day of year 7 of this blog, elliotsreading; I have posted every day since I began keeping this blog, a daily record of what I'm reading and what I'm thinking about what I'm reading. Thanks for checking in, and thanks for your occasional comments. Looking back over the past 6 years of posts, these are the five posts that, for one reason or another, who knows exactly why?, have had the most page views:

One Horrifying Concept and What it Means: George Saunders's story The Semplica Girls. June 17, 2013. I have championed Saunders's work since reading his first collection in an ARC; Semplica Girls, which appeared in the New Yorker and has been reprinted several times, is maybe the strangest and most disturbing of all of his stories. Somehow my post on this story rose to the top of the Google search for key terms, and there you have it.

Eudora Welty's Story "A Memory." June 20, 2011. This is a very short story by a great writer, and I imagine the story appears on many high-school reading lists. Somehow my post, which interprets this story, made it to one of the search engines - about.com I think. I call this one "the post that launched a thousand term papers."

What Is the Name of Sancho Panza's Donkey? November 8, 2011. I tried to answer this age-old question, which I guess a lot of readers are still asking.

Diamonds Are Forever: The Ending of The Art of Fielding. November 20, 2011. A lot of people read this novel by Chad Harrach back in 2011, but I doubt whether it's still widely read, so the popularity of this post is enigmatic. My guess is that many people may be searching "Diamonds are Forever" and are surprised to end up reading a post about a college baseball team and a faculty scandal.

The End of The Portrait of a Lady: How Could You! November 30, 2010. I imagine a lot of readers are frustrated by the end of James's novel, as was I. On the other hand, maybe a lot of readers are not going to get to the end of the novel and are searching for someone out there - me - who will clue them in on the conclusion.