W. Doug Bolden

Ok, so the name is bullocks, but it was meant to be. The basic gist breaks down as so: I was finished with WORL 2006 and wanted something else to do. I had stumbled across a set of Barnes and Noble books each of which include three to seven novels (or a collection of short stories) by a particular author. The authors are all old hats, and the novels chosen are meant to be representative. In other words, once you had completed the B&N set, you probably could carry on a good conversation about them.

It got me to thinking about something I had wanted to do in the past. Several times, I wanted to take a this or that author's works and read them through, at least so much as read a good number of them. A representative amount, as it were. I figured this would give me a couple of weeks or a month to get to know a person's writing, to see themes, to get the idea of how they worked together.

CASSARC is a less formal version of WORL. The idea is I take a handful of authors. For now, I am saying eight but we will see. For each one, I will read about two to five novels, or roughly about one thousand pages or so. I will do it in chronological order, and will generally research the writer as I am reading.

Besides that, no real rules. It is just something fun to do...

How I'm Doing...

1. Jules Verne
1. Five Weeks in a Balloon
2. Journey to the Interior of the Earth
3. From the Earth to the Moon