About

I started Collected Miscellany in 2003 to provide an outlet for my non-political blogging. I am an avid reader and so thought it would be fun to start a lit blog – as they were then called – and provide “news, views, reviews and interviews” dealing with books, authors, reading, literature, etc. The rest is history, as they say.

At the start it was much more of a “literature” blog than it is now. As I have noted many times over the years, my reading taste is eclectic and changes frequently. In the early years I read more contemporary fiction and interacted with other lit blogs a lot more (that world seemed a lot smaller then, than it does now). My changing career and growing family has changed that and the blog reflects this change. Now, it is mostly informal reviews of the books I have read and the occasional interview. I also read a lot more young adult fiction than I did at the start.

I have often tried to bring on contributors to provide more, and different, content.  Jeff Grim has been the longest lasting of the contributors (for details click over to the aptly named contributors page). If you have an interest in contributing to the blog, please feel free to drop me an email.

From the start the title reflected an overall lack of focus or niche – outside of a love of reading.  And we still review just about every genre, age group, subject matter and style. Hence, “Collected Miscellany.”  And at this point the traffic overwhelmingly comes from Google searches for particular books or authors (I think students in particular come seeking help with assignments) and for some time the tag line –  “Writing for Google Since 2003” – reflected this fact.  But it seems unproductive as an explanation for the site so I changed it (and I probably will change it again given my fickle nature).

Hope this helps, and thanks for stopping by.

Kevin