Ode-athon recap!

First off, a huge thanks to all the participants!

• David Walston wrote about Douglas Adams, Gary Jennings, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.
• Pat Dilloway wrote about John Irving.
• The Geek Twins wrote about Michael Crichton.
• Armchair Squid wrote about Maurice Sendak.

I wrote about Peter Ackroyd, Douglas Adams, Dave Barry, Roberto Bolano, Jerome Charyn, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Stephen King, David Maine, Herman Melville, Grant Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, and Bill Watterson.  And because even that wasn't enough, I also included William Least Heat-Moon, Robert Pirsig, and Quentin Tarantino.

Readers of my other blog had a slightly different version of this recap, where I mentioned reading John le Carre in recent weeks, and if that had been earlier I may well have included him as well!  The thing is, this whole thing was as much about the writers I enjoy reading as the ones who have inspired my creative process, and what le Carre did was exactly that, in a fairly major way, introducing a major new wrinkle to my favorite Space Corps story after Seven Thunders, new character motivation that also helped inform a new part of the story I've been batting around for months.  It was already a story that heavily featured espionage, le Carre's specialty, but after reading three of the author's books I realized what was missing, and hopefully the resulting product will be the better for it.

It's too late to participate officially, but you can still leave your favorite writers in the comments!