Dear readers,

one year ago I brought this blog to life without being entirely sure where that would bring me and what an enrichment it would be to my life. I just startet to write, then forgot about it for almost a whole summer and in autumn finally found out, which concrete use I could assign to Alyrene’s Blog: book reviews. By now books define almost completely the content of my blog and it’s great this way. To the question on which language to use, which I continuously asked myself throughout the last year, I still don’t have an answer, mainly because I don’t know, if You, my dear readers, prefer to read English or German 😉 Therefore, currently I write based on my gut feeling: Books, which I read in German, I review in German, English-speaking ones in English and for all the other posts it depends on the time I have, my motivation and the context of the post, if I write in my native language or not. I will probably use this method in the future until I find a better way of doing it that is easy to realize.

In celebration of today a little résumé shouldn’t be missing: In one year I published 40 blog posts, 77 humans like my blog so much, they are following it now (big thanks at this point to all of You! Without You I probably wouldn’t be as motivated to continue this project.) and 531 persons visited Alyrene’s Blog. That is terrific! I am overjoyed that this little website goes so well. And the Instagram-account is an enrichment too. The exchange and inspiration, which bookstagram brings with it, are great and definitely wouldn’t want to miss them. Pinterest on the other hand didn’t go so well, which probably is because I neglected it but I think that is fine. One can’t be active one all channels without a break. Therefore, I will probably delete the Pinterest account that accompanies the blog and use that platform solely for private issues, it was worth a try.

Obviously, in a retrospective of a book blog the read books mustn’t be missing, that’s why following there is a collage of all the books that I reviewed here in the last 365 days:

Nothing came close to these five absolute highlights:

1. „La Peste“ by Albert Camus
2. „Corpus Delicti“ by Juli Zeh
3. „Dort wo die Sterne im Wasser leuchten“ by Clara Blais
4. „Clap When You Land“ by Elizabeth Acevedo
5. „Wir Leuchten“ by Joe Rain

So much for the past. Now a few words about what is planned for the future (It’s easier to party with anticipation :D). In the last few months I realized more and more often that people constantly find less time to read and consequently are blogs, whose topic is books, which also demand time to be read, relatively rarely completely read. This is quite a pity, because those posts always contain considerable time, thought and work. Since I have the feeling the people don’t lack the interest but rather time, the idea to create the blog’s own podcast (basically posts set to music) developed continuously to become an actual plan. Because I don’t know the necessary technology all that well, I will work more closely with Deimos again (some of You might remember his support with the December posts). A concrete timetable however is not yet set.

After I am done with my graduation in a little more than a month, I hopefully have finally a lot of time over the summer to read and blog again, I am already very curious for the next books. There will definitely be the new book by Moses Mikheyev: „Bodies: A Romantic Bloodbath“, Michael Peinkofers „Splitterwelten“, „Not My Ruckus“ by Chad Musick as well as „Jenseits des Abgrunds“ by Frances Miralles and Ángeles Doñate.

Now I will enjoy this day, which is, besides the birthday of my blog, also mine and that of my brother. To everybody that has a reason to celebrate today and also to everybody, for whom today is just a normal Wednesday in April, I wish from my heart the best.

A big, big Thank You to everybody, who read my thoughts turned into posts! You are great! To our paths, so that they do not part again immediately, to another year!

Yours sincerely,
Aly

PS: Dear big brother, if you read this: Happy Birthday! ❤
PPS: Hughe thanks to Deimos, who translated main parts of this post.