Round the World

As I've mentioned on other occasions, I like to keep track of the search terms that people use to find this site. There are two major categories of terms that bring people in from around the world: robots and Agatha Christie. For the robot posts, I get clumps of hits, nearly all of them from school districts. But the Christie hits never cease to amaze me. I knew in principle that her work was known the world over, but it's interesting to see near-daily reminders of the fact that readers in Thailand and Saudi Arabia are reading her stories, which I frequently discover in the context of Google searches containing her name that arrive at my blog. I suspect that most of these searches are looking for context for her stories: 1930s London is a long way away for a lot of modern readers even in the English-speaking world, and the Labors of Hercules stories have an added layer below that.

Sadly, I've never been able to coax any of these individuals to explain what brings them to my site in particular* but it does seem to come in waves. The Nemean Lion page is one of the most-loaded, but the Stymphalean Birds page has recently gotten much more attention. I looked to see whether the (excellent) Poirot series with David Suchet is doing the Labors, but as far as I can tell, while that is planned, they have not gotten to it yet -- and would be released in the US before much of the non-English-speaking world anyway. There is at least one anime series based on these books, but that's nothing new.

So for anyone who arrives here looking for those things, mind if I pick your brain? I'm dying to ask about your mystery reading habits :)

In the meantime, back to working on that post explaining why Robert Parker (sadly recently deceased) was an excellent fantasy novelist. (And why he'd scowl at me for so saying)

* Actually, I suspect that I am primarily seeing browser pre-caching.