Bookshelf Alphabet Soup

Ah, Fridays ... the perfect time of week to go lifting ideas from other people’s blogs. Today’s victim - er, inspiration - is Stuck in a Book, where I came across this post. (Just scroll down to the bit about the recent dearth of authors beginning with N - and I, Q, U, X, Y, Z....)

It got me thinking about my own literary alphabet, as far as it can be determined from three and a half years of records and an overloaded memory. How many letters could I claim to have read? Most called to mind a whole bunch of authors, including books by both Henry and Helen Fielding and both Oliver and Olivia Goldsmith. I managed a couple of Ns (Katherine Neville, Chris Nyst) and one solitary I (Washington Irving, creator of Rip van Winkle and Ichabod Crane). Q had me puzzled for a while until I thought of three at once, and every one a pseudonym: Amanda Quick, Julia Quinn, and Ellery Queen. (Okay, so the Ellery Queen was a single short story, but I wanted to show off how many Qs I could muster.)

But U, X, Y, and Z are still blanks. The last can be fixed easily enough with some Zola (finally), and X might require a trip to the history section to borrow something by, say, Xerxes. The other two ... I don’t know. Anyone have any suggestions for the last four letters on my list?