The other day someone asked in a post in my word-geek group, what was the best novel of the last year? She got about 120 responses and I copied them down, so as to study their titles and try to remember the authors' names. Some were mentioned several times by people who didn't read earlier responses. Some were not novels, or were not of the last year, but I wrote them down anyway. It seemed like a good collection of about 120 books that people I value liked.

Two that got mentioned several times were A Gentleman in Moscow and Where the Crawdads Sing(?), but much to my surprise some people jumped in and said they didn't like them. It was like, here were books that clearly reached a Lot of people but clearly didn't reach a few. And much to my surprise, my wife verified that about the crawdads. Didn't get through it, she said.

This brought up the question: will your book be universally acclaimed or have some enemies? I can tell by my ratings, I have a few enemies. Mostly 5's, yes, but a few 3's. I take the threes as a begrudging admiration that, well yeah it's an ok book, I just didn't happen to like it. Or, don't happen to like the author.

It's a rough life, this author's life. I can see some people falling by the wayside already. Feel free to comment on this post (I believe I will see it). Thanks for the support. To read the best of my work, scroll down the template (on the right) and click on a few things. You'll find my stories, a surprising number of which have been here, free, all along.