Ahem... this is just something I've been curious about for a while, and since I have been reading the Vlad books (again) I figured I would ask. Which skzb book did you start with? For a while I had thought that I started with Phoenix. Which I was pretty happy with. It's always been my favorite of the Vlad novels, and I had developed a pretty strong argument as to why there needs to by 9 books 'chronologically' before and 9 books after Phoenix, and all sorts of other interesting theories. However, after looking again at the publication dates it dawned on me that I really started with Cowboy Feng's. This was a bit of a surprise. I had known that I had gotten both pretty close together, but despite how much I like Feng's (which is probably too much), Phoenix got me hooked on Vlad. It's the Vlad personality in Phoenix that then hooked me (Vlad the victim of a great deux ex machina... etc) into skzb. (Of course then PG came out, and well... that's a whole 'nother thing.) I always wonder if that's why my perception of Vlad in all the other books is sort of based upon on 'well, he was like that... and now he's like this... but in between, he met a drummer... so it all works...' ... On the other hand, I still have the vaguest memory of reorganizing the books on my shelf and making the happy discovery that the author of Feng's was the same as Phoenix. It's was sort of like 'oh, well there's somebody I should read some more by'. Which either means I didn't read by authors at that point, or that I just really had liked the covers for both... MattJ