I didn’t remember until late last night, but yesterday on September 15th, my blog reached 18 years old! Gosh, I never thought when I dipped my blogging toe into the water back on Blogspot in 2008 that I’d still be going – but I just love talking about and sharing books, the best kind of Read More
Category: Blogging
SCAMMER ALERT!!!
Sadly, I’ve had to add the following to my ‘About’ page… IMPORTANT: Please be aware that beginning May/June 2026 someone has been impersonating me to approach authors. They are calling themselves Anna BookBel with a space and are using the email address: anna.book.bel2@gmail.com and have scraped my gravatar image. As I’m not the target of the scam, there’s Read More
A Decade of Blogging
On September 15, 2008 I asked a question, “Is there anybody out there?” I wondered. Amazingly, there was, and ten years later, I’m still here. Thank you for reading, visiting, commenting. I always appreciate it. … The Wordle above is made up of my most used and favourite tags and categories over the ten years. Read More
It’s my 9th Blog-Birthday!
Dear Readers, Today I have been blogging for 9 whole years! When I was searching for a picture to illustrate the nine years – I found the number Nine written in Elvish (see above), as devised by Tolkien. In the Lord of the Rings films, the nine members of the cast who formed the Read More
How I’ve Read – Revisited
Nurturing my reading habit I’ve been adding old book reviews that failed to transfer over from my old blog to this one in the hope that I can finally erase the old blog. I came across a post which I wrote in March 2010, which I felt was definitely worth revisiting, so I’ve edited my Read More
Bookish ramblings & giveaway results
The start of term has been so busy at school for me, and my daughter, my blogging has suffered slightly! I have been reading, just not had time to write the reviews – I have rather a pile building up. The 12th issue of Shiny New Books will be published in a fortnight too, so Read More
AnnaBookBel is 8!
My blog is eight years old today! It started off at Blogspot as Gaskella on September 15th 2008, eventually moving to WordPress. It was still called Gaskella at that stage, but later I changed the title to Annabel’s House of Books. Then, last summer I took the plunge and bought my own domain – annabookbel.net. I paid Read More
Best laid plans…
It should have been straightforward. I planned to move my own domain from one webhosting company to another. Already having an account with 1&1 for Shiny, moving my domain from iPage to there would save me a second tranche of webhosting fees as you can have multiple domains at little extra cost. I’d also found Read More
BBAW Interview Day
Welcome to day two of Book Bloggers Appreciation Week – It’s interview day. I was assigned Amanda of The Zen Leaf and we’ve been batting emails back and forth for a few days interviewing each other. Amanda’s blog is new to me so after having a good look around it I started off by asking Amanda Read More
Reading habits: Male vs Female Authors
Elle wrote a thought-provoking post a few days ago titled Am I a Sexist Reviewer? about how she actually reads a fairly even split of female:male authors, but doesn’t blog about all the novels by men, as she finds more to talk about in general in novels by women. It got me thinking about the Read More
The Pleasure of Vicarious Reading …
I promise I’ll have a book review for you very soon – honest! Until then, I thought I’d natter about something that occurred to me the other day. This was after I’d commented on Jane’s best of 2014 post which she styled as A Box of Books for 2014, and her reply to me. I Read More
A Weekend Miscellany…
Apparently it is #ArchiveDay today. I don’t know who has designated it such – but twitter is alive with tweets to good folks’ archives – so I shall highlight my three most viewed posts since starting this blog – and an odd collection they make too: ‘Fashion! Turn to the Left. Fashion! Turn to the Read More
Now We Are Six…
As much as I’d like to tell you this post is about A.A.Milne’s charming book of poetry for children – it isn’t! It’s about something much closer to my heart, for it was six years ago today that I dipped my toe into the book-blogging world. It’s gone so quickly! (On other days I might Read More
Thank you!
A quick little post to say thank you. I hope you don’t mind if I blow my own trumpet a little, but just now I was scrolling down my sidebar and I came to my ebuzzing stats bar – and it told me that the June blog stats were up, and then I saw the Read More
A's HoB Q&A – Part Two 'the science bit'
I challenged you to ask me questions and you did … see the previous post for a variety of bookish and Oxfordian answers. Today it’s time to answer the science questions that you asked me – and I shall go in reverse order. Simon T (Stuck in a Book) asked: What is your favourite chemical Read More
A's HoB Q&A – The Answers – Part one!
Thank you for asking some great questions – some of which required a lot of thought to answer! I’m splitting my answers into two posts – the specific science questions will get their own treatment in a day or two, but here are my answers to all the rest – and do feel free to Read More
A's HoBks Q&A
I blame Simon for this! 😀 Just over a week ago, my pal and co-editor of Shiny New Books decided to ask his readers if there were any questions that they wanted to ask him in a post here. A few days later, he published his answers here. It was fascinating reading, and Simon’s answers Read More
Thoughts on my header photo
I’ve been mostly writing reviews for Shiny New Books this week after finishing Frog Music, but wanted to write something on the blog for the weekend… My eye caught my header photo which when taken a few years ago, I compiled a shelf of favourite reads over the years, mostly those getting a full five stars from Read More
Scoring books, some musings on the subject
There are two definite camps in the book blogosphere: those who give/find useful star ratings, and those who don’t. I’ve always been in the former camp, but I do recognise that ratings are no more than a highly personal snapshot of opinion at time of publication. I started out giving whole stars out of five, Read More
What's in a name?
You might notice that I’ve had a bit of a re-branding for Gaskella. When I started blogging over four years ago, I tried to think of an imaginative name for this blog. I enjoy a good pun, but couldn’t think of anything bookish that I liked that hadn’t already been used; there are some crackers Read More
Oxford Bookbloggers meet
A group of eight bookbloggers met last night at an Oxford pub – appropriately named ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’. (Good ale, no big screens, decent standard pub food). It was a shame more couldn’t come, the date ended up clashing for few, but those of us there had a lovely evening of mainly (ahem!) Read More
Gaskella is 2 – plus a shelf-clearing giveaway!
Woohoo! Yes, it was two years ago that I started Gaskella. I started off on Blogspot – moving over to WordPress early this year, and in the 730 days since starting I’ve posted 394 times which is pretty good going I think, and amassed over 1700 comments (that includes my replies). Despite this being an Read More
Click-through clarity
While I clearly state on my ‘Info & Stuff’ page above, and mention from time to time in posts, I haven’t been shouting from the rooftops that when you click through on a book title link (or films etc), you’ll get taken to Amazon where you can order said item (or anything else for that Read More
A marvellous birthday weekend…
This post was republished into its original place in my blog’s timeline from my lost posts archive I’ve not been very active on the blogging front the past week – but I have had other things on my mind. I had a one of those big birthdays with a zero on the end this weekend, Read More
gaskella on normblog
Today, I’ve been appearing over at normblog. Normblog is the blog of distinguished academician Norman Geras who is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester, he’s husband to Adèle and father to Sophie Hannah. While Norm’s main concerns are politics and his many short posts every day make fascinating reading, every Friday Norm Read More
Round-up – Fireworks & Blog Stats
It was the fireworks evening at my daughter’s school last night. Yes, I know it’s not the usual timing, but by having our display a week later we are able to get one of the best firework companies in the country to do our little event. Kimbolton Fireworks are the biz – they’re doing the Read More
My Blog is 1 today!
Dear everyone, It is a year ago today that I dipped my toes into the blogosphere with a very tentative post titled Is there anybody out there?, (the Pink Floyd inspired title was in deference to Rick Wright who had died earlier that day). I’ll be getting back to bookish stuff in a day or Read More
Gaskella goes walkabout on Bookmunch
I was delighted when Peter at Bookmunch invited me to review a book for them. So you can now see my review of Fists by Pietro Grossi here. I really enjoyed it.
To star or not to star …
Opinion has always been divided about whether or not to give ratings for books – be it points out of ten, stars out of five, or any other system you choose. When all is said and done, the words written about a book reveal far more than a mere rating. So why bother with the Read More
Synchronicity & Serendipity
Sometimes in the book blogosphere we’re all looking at books of the moment – several reviews will be posted about a new book or a title in the news – there’s a synchronicity about it all … Take the book I’m reading now for instance – Warwick Collins new novel The Sonnets which puts Shakespeare’s Read More
