If you have poked around my website, you might be aware that every book, as well as being listed under the country/author, is also listed chronologically, so that you can see what books were published in any given year. I must admit to being somewhat fascinated by finding out that Book X was published in the same year as Book Y and have long thought it would be interesting to show books chronologically for each country as well as alphabetically by author. I have now done this for literature from the United States, the country where I have most books and most authors under review, not least because I have always found the US novel to be of special interest. It includes not only all the US books on my site but also the births and deaths of authors as well as quite a few books not on my site, in particular poetry, drama and non-fiction which will not, of course, appear on my site. However, as compiling this list took far longer than I thought it would, I do not see myself doing the same for other countries any time soon. I hope you find it interesting.
You may also have noticed that the design – what WordPress calls the theme – has changed. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the previous theme had not been updated since 2012, which is a long time in WordPress years, and was starting to show some incompatibilities with WordPress. Secondly, I just thought it might be nice to have a change now and then. I have to admit that I spent no more than a few minutes selecting a design, picking one that looked all right and, more particularly, was up-to-date. As there are hundreds or even thousands of possible designs, one that was up-to-date but also tried and tested was important to me. However, if after using it for a while, I am not too happy with it, I may well do further research and switch again. But then probably not.
I also took the opportunity to update the list of recommended blogs. Quite a few were defunct. A couple had changed their URLs. There were also quite a few which I visit regularly and which were not on the list. This list has now been updated. You can find it by scrolling down. It is on the right below the recent blog posts. Some of the blogs are not in English but I can recommend all of them. If you want more The Literary Saloon has loads.