{"id":15650,"date":"2024-02-21T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2024-02-21T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/?p=15650"},"modified":"2024-02-11T11:06:33","modified_gmt":"2024-02-11T16:06:33","slug":"a-hundred-looks-at-a-hundred-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/a-hundred-looks-at-a-hundred-books\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hundred Looks at a Hundred Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Last Wednesday’s post was the 100th book review published on this blog. Eight were of my own books and one (Book Review (not really), A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving<\/a>) was, as the title proclaims, not really a review of the actual book. Still, that leaves 91 legitimate reviews of books I didn’t write and that’s many more than I anticipated when I posted the first review in November of 2011. The blog was just about three months old then. The About page<\/a> says that the most likely subjects of books reviewed are “…those related to something I personally like such as old roads or cars.” That first review (Ghost Town of Route 66<\/a>) clearly fits and I think the 100th (Walking to Listen) does too. It’s not about a particular road but it is about being “on the road” which seems close enough. Besides, the phrase is “such as<\/em> old roads or cars” not “exclusively<\/em> old roads and cars”. The truth is anything “I personally like” is fair game.<\/p>\n

When I wrote that “old roads or cars” line, I expected the bulk of my reviews to involve one or the other but that has not been the case. An imprecise classification effort found only 5 reviews of books about or featuring cars. There were 32 about roads which means that 63 were about neither.<\/p>\n

I was not surprised to see that only 9 of the books I reviewed were fiction. Books are either fiction or not but they can appear in more than one of my arbitrary subject categories. Those counts are:<\/p>\n