Reflections A to Z

It’s been a journey reading mystery authors A to Z. Before Wendy and I start with a new set of mysteries, I wanted to say a few words to wrap up my part of the effort.  We began the A-Z author trip as a lark that wound up with about a year and a half of reading books that might never have come under our reading radar.  With a deliberate purpose of choosing an author purely by the letter of their name was usually easy, but the more difficult letters like X, the  website “Stop You’re Killing me” bailed these humble bloggers more than once. I have to admit I read a few crazy stories and what I called orphan titles that likely never had wide circulation in their day.  I went to libraries, book stores big and small, and second-hand bookstores galore. I was fortunate to get some cool feedback, including two of the authors responding to my posts on their books.  Other cool things that happened were contact from a videographer and also from a man that maintains a website about one of my authors.  At one point I was humbled when I dared to be a bit harsh and really critique a book.  I held back a bit at the risk of being pompous and being rude to the author.  The author contacted me directly and I really was glad I had modified my post.  It turns out that jumping into a series without really knowing a back story and then judging the series based on one book can be a problem.  Again it was part of the growing pains of being a blogger that writes about books.  I loved every minute of it and look soon for the next part of the journey of two friends who blog about mysteries with very different points of view.  To those of you who read our posts, thank you for playing along.