Tag Archives: Shirley Hazzard.Mary Oliver

Thanks to kind help from Sue at Whispering Gums, I can now find out which of my blog posts have received most hits in the last year. It’s hard to know what these figures mean. Maybe a lot of people visited the post for a second or so, long enough to realise that there was nothing useful there about the subject of their interest. Maybe the post is on a school reading list somewhere, and has been semi-plagiarised by hundreds of students over the year. Maybe this is an indication of which of my posts is most brilliant. Maybe none of those. Anyhow here’s the list for 2023:

1. The Book Group and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (June 2018)
2. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (January 2019)
3. Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother (March 2023)
4. Mary Oliver’s House of Light (April 2020)
5. Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (July 2020)
6. Ellen van Neerven’s Comfort Food (also July 2020)
7. The Book Group on David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue (February 2021)
8. Robert Alter’s Psalms (September 2020)
9. Ruby Reads 29: Gift (December 2021, about The March of the Ants, by Ursula Dubosarsky and Tohby Riddle)
10. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives at the Book Group (April 2020)

It looks as if my posts on poetry generate most traffic, though the one on The Transit of Venus, mysteriously to me, is way out ahead of the rest. The book group makes three appearances, which is probably an indication that we choose books that have a lot of social capital. I suspect the post on Robert Alter’s translation of the psalms is visited so often because it includes an embedded video of Boney M singing ‘Rivers of Babylon’.

Having learned how to find these statistics, I’ll try your patience a little by giving you the all-time top 10 posts:

1. Travelling with the Art Student (November 2014)
2. The Book Group and Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (June 2018)
3. (Re-)reading Kevin Gilbert’s poetry (April 2012)
4. Bran Nue Dae (January 2010)
5. Mary Oliver’s House of Light (April 2020)
6. The book group’s Harp in the South (February 2011)
7. Jasper Jones at the Book Group (May 2010)
8. Mary Oliver’s Twelve Moons (January 2019)
9. Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (June 2013)
10. Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (April 2010)

Someone lifted a close-up photo of a painting by Brian Rutenberg from ‘Travelling with the Art Student’ and put it up on Pinterest, and hordes of people came looking for more – sadly it was the only photo in the post. Shirley Hazzard has otherwise been consistently in the lead, and Book Group books and poetry have pulled in the crowds. I think my post on Kevin Gilbert’s poetry was on a school reading list somewhere for a time – it gives a brief account of what can go wrong when a well-meaning whitefella edits a First Nations book.

I don’t know what to make of the absence of any posts I’ve written since 2020.

That’s it for my 2023 round-ups. Thank you all for swelling my statistics, for your likes and comments, and your silent, lurking presences.