I mean, nothing like buying two books in a series, using publication dates as a guide, only to find those two books worlds and years apart. The reason? There were several books in between, but they weren’t shown on the same screen. Even author sites and fan sites do this.
Take Lilian Jackson Braun’s quirky and delightful The Cat Who… mysteries. If you go by the order of Amazon’s listings, methodical journalist Jim Qwilleran and his two crime-solving cats may suddenly jump from a big city newspaper to “400 miles north of everywhere” with no clues whatever. And there are dozens of The Cat Who… books.
Although Tony Hillerman isn’t quite so prolific, attempting to arrange his absorbing adventures of modern Navajo cops by release date is still a tall order. Futile, too. Each book isn’t always listed. Some may pop up on one click that didn’t show on a previous visit. Why the heck is that? When I first started following Officer Jim Chee, (the first books in Hillerman’s listing) his superior, Lt. Joe Leaphorn, was a grizzled, gray-haired veteran. In the next book I found featuring that venerable soul, he was a rookie patrolman. And I still haven’t found the original Jim Chee title that got me intrigued in the first place. It was a Reader’s Digest Condensed selection. And we donated our entire collection of those volumes to a library sale. So I may never know.You will not have that problem with me, folks! If you’ll notice the left column, I have clearly placed “Book One,” “Book Two,” etc. in each book’s title. This will get very important when the first three are re-released by my new publisher, VerveStar, with differing covers. There are 5 books in all.
Seriously, if anyone out there knows where to find chronological listings of authors’ works, please let me know! I prefer reading things in proper order!
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