The Niche of Time: Puzzling Evidence

I’ve been a little puzzled lately. I seem to have about three, maybe four regular readers, who will turn in to read whatever I post. I probably know all of them personally, which would explain their interest. But every now and then I get little spurts on various posts. The numbers are still pretty low, but irregular enough to rouse my curiosity.

What causes anyone to check in on The Niche of Time? One obvious answer seems to be J. R. R. Tolkien. My summations and notes, lovingly garnished with artwork gathered from the internet, usually draw about a hundred looks over a couple of weeks’ time. Even simple, almost peripheral notations or quotations about Tolkien attract above average interest: the recent quotations by Pratchett and Tolkien got 89, and the review ‘Variety of Interests,’ which included a look at Tolkien: Lighting Up the Darkness, got 40.

But how to explain the other spurts? What draws people to Maggie (41), or ‘Fancy Rooted in Truth,’ (81), a rather long quotation from George Macdonald Fraser? The Fraser I can possibly understand, but why does Maggie have more than my regular four readers? Puzzling indeed. Perhaps it is just the results of some automated algorithm.

Anyway, views (while welcome) mean very little to me. I started the Niche as a means to catalog my books, including pictures of covers and short personal reviews (even when I’ve included someone else’s reviews from Goodreads or Amazon they always pretty closely express my own opinions). It evolved into a sort of omnium gatherum, or commonplace book, of my interests, possessions, and personal history. I now like to think of it as a sort of scrapbook my people can leaf through when I am gone, or their children can go over if they ever wonder what old Uncle Brer was all about, or at least the better parts of him, not the obvious bunch of inadequacies that goes slumping through the day and that your Aunt would no doubt gladly give you an earful about. (“Let’s recreate him, using Science!” – The Simpsons.) In this world, just a pale, enigmatic shadow cast on the mind in the end.