From the Great Southwest Back to Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle

Inheritance, the last book of the Cycle, arrived before Christmas. But I was involved with Tony Hillerman’s Navajo tales and was loathe to leave it mid-series.

I’ve been engrossed in the American Southwest, ancient and modern, for some months now. There was a trilogy of Anasazi Mysteries  by anthropologists Mike and Kathy Gear; Kirk Mitchell’s series featuring Emmett Parker, a Comanche agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, often  teamed with a Modoc FBI agent, Anna Turnipseed; and lastly all 18 volumes from Tony Hillerman. Actually, Hillerman penned more than that. I only followed the adventures of Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. Great stuff.

But now I’m back to my home genre – fantasy. And no one writes it with more meticulous detail than Christopher Paolini. And, as I did with Harry Potter, I won’t read the new book without first re-reading all the preceding ones. One can’t just dive in without getting reacquainted with the characters, places and situations can one? It’s been way too long since Book Three, Brisingr. And it’s complicated.

So that’s where I am now - halfway through Eragon.

I have no idea how I got so caught up in Native American mysteries and culture. It was quite a profound experience, actually. Maybe it harks back to my travels through Shiprock, NM and Casa Grande, AZ back in 1973. But now (clicking my ruby slippers together three times) it’s good to be home.

Why can’t SOMEONE offer chronological listings?

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!