November 5, 2010 / Leslie

Friday Finds / Blog Hop ~ November 5-8

The Book Blogger Hop, a weekly event hosted by Jen at Crazy For Books, is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and share our love of the written word!

Post about the Hop on your blog. Spread the word about the book party! The Hop lasts Friday through Monday. If you don’t have time to Hop today, come back later and join the fun! Each week there is a new discussion question for your post. This week’s question is:

What are your feelings on losing followers?
Have you ever stopped following a blog?

I don’t worry too much about followers. Since this is a WordPress blog I don’t have a google friend connect widget so it’s not immediately visible how many followers I have. My regular readers either follow by email or subscribe to my feed. If I want statistics on visitors and subscribers I have to look them up.

I’m not too sure the google friend connect number is a good indicator of how many people are regular readers. It does tell you how many different people have stopped by at least once. More important to me are comments and conversation. I’m happy if someone comes back again. I realize not everyone that stops by will comment every time, and that’s ok, we’re all quite busy.

I haven’t stopped following very many blogs, maybe a few that I shouldn’t have added in the first place. I try to follow blogs that have the same tastes in books as I do.

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week? Share your FRIDAY FINDS! This weekly event is hosted by Should Be Reading.

Lawrence Block has a new Matthew Scudder novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, coming out in May 2011. This is probably my favorite detective series. This story will be set back in time in the early ’80s and will fill in some of the gaps of Scudder’s early history. I’m eagerly awaiting this one as the early books are some of my favorites.

Grand Master Lawrence Block returns to his most popular character, Matthew Scudder, as Scudder takes on his most personal case. Matthew Scudder is finally on the straight and narrow when he runs into “High-Low” Jack Ellery, a childhood friend from the Bronx. In Scudder, Jack sees the moral man he might have become. In Jack, Scudder sees the hard-won sobriety he hopes to achieve. Then Ellery, following to the letter the dictates of Alcoholics Anonymous’ infamous twelve steps, is shot down while attempting to atone for past sins, and Scudder is drawn into a murder investigation that threatens to upset his path toward recovery–and get him killed in the process.