Reading books

I just had a discussion with my husband (on the phone, he’s out-of-town) about reading books chronologically or not, and why it should be a certain way. There are differences to authors and series and authors and all the books they write. The gist of it being: how an author intends for their work to be read could mean more to some than others, and in my opinion, for me I like to read things in order of how they were written and published since that goes the route that makes sense, one or two or three books about some subject builds on characters if they are in more than one book, things mean different things when viewed from the beginning to the end, or from the end first then backwards. (Consider the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. I only like the series read as published, it means so much more. The magic of it is lesser to such a degree when read as they are numbered by the publisher in our current times. This is a very deep topic, I don’t mean to entirely flesh it out in this post, only to reference the idea.)

I started reading The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly recently. I asked my husband if there was anything I could read (he buys books all the time) and he gave me that one, telling me “it’s a stand-alone book” which is a big thing for me to understand if it is or not first, before delving into it.

So I started reading it the other night and found references to a characters past life and just haven’t read much of it, falling asleep fast when I read at night time in bed. The references bugged me, and today I added the book to my sidebar since I hadn’t done so yet, and googled the book to get the authors name since I couldn’t remember it and just wanted to “copy & paste” it, being lazy, I guess you could call it.

I didn’t close the page I opened on the author’s site, and later coming back to my laptop I noticed it and clicked around and read some on his site, and quickly gleaned the information that incensed my emotive base of what I read and why.

The Scarecrow may be a “stand-alone book” –sort of. Not really. The Poet by Michael Connelly from 1996. That was all I had to read about to know I have read too much of The Scarecrow already. In my opinion, that is