Only the book wasn't available (at the time) as an e-book, and they didn't even have a paper copy of it at the library. So I decided I would try to find it at a used bookstore, because why not? I mean sure I could have gone on Amazon and ordered it and had it in 5-8 days, but that didn't appeal to me.
So with that I began occasionally stopping at the used bookstores in town and seeing if they had a copy. They didn't, but they had many other paperback books I'd read once before. I no longer had hardly any of my books; I'd sold many of them to the bookstore years ago when ebooks first became a thing.
But as I walked around the store trying to find a copy of the book Master Of The Five Magics I decided that I liked the way paper books looked, and I began missing my old collection of paperback scifi and fantasy books (and some other favorites), so I decided that if I had a chance I'd pick up some of my other old favorites, too, and re-stock my collection; not necessarily to read but because I liked them, liked having them around and the way they looked. They were nostalgic and interesting and fun.
With that, I sort of gradually slid into just plain book collecting, and that's where I realized I was the day I was in a used bookstore and came across some old E E Smith scifi books that they were selling for just a buck each. E E Smith is one of the early scifi writers (I once read most of his Lensmen series after hearing it might have been an inspiration for Green Lantern, my favorite superhero). So I bought the books. I'm not particularly a fan of Smith, but they were old and collectible books, and I liked them, so I bought 'em.
That was the tipping point, so now I'm more or less committed to building up a library of books I loved and/or find interesting, particularly focusing on scifi/fantasy paperbacks, with a side of paperback movie novelizations, which I have always loved. As a kid I often liked reading movie novelizations for movies I'd seen, and generally preferred them over the movie.
That's all the intro to this post, in which I proudly display the three latest books I picked up, during a stop at the library yesterday to return books. They are:
The first two I got mainly because they were movie novelizations; someday when I own a bookstore/toy rental company/book museum there'll be a whole wing devoted to those. The last one is a book I first saw when the boys and I were spending the day at the Madison library (the big one). We were hanging out on the level where they let you eat snacks, because libraries are cool now, and while the boys were eating I was looking at the display books where the librarians group together books in themes like "Back To School" or "Beans!!!" or something. I'm not sure the grouping that had Willis' book in it, but I was drawn by the cover and the description
I put it on my list of books to eventually read, but the problem was that there isn't an electronic version of the book at the library, which means that I can't get it through the library as an ebook, and the volume of books I read is such that I never want to buy them if I don't have to. (I'm still reading about 100 books per year, so it'd be like $500 or more on books per year to read this.) Then I saw it at the library and decided I'd spend all of 50 cents -- the cost for used books at our library sales -- and picked it up.
Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
So there you go. I'm a book collector, having come full circle from when I eschewed ever reading a paper book again.
PS I found Master Of The Five Magics about a year into the search, at a bookstore near the home of my elderly uncle, because I now go to bookstores in cities where I have business, too. I re-read it, and it was still a solid book. A bit more basic than I remembered but not a bad read.
3 comments:
Man, right now, I'm doing good to get in one book a month.
It's horrible.
There are worse things to collect. I'm still downsizing my books as I do prefer ebooks. I'm more minimalist and prefer fewer things. (Moving books is annoying. And I expect to have to move a couple more times in the not to distant future, and I don't want to have boxes and boxes of books.)
Andrew:
I've dropped off a bit, too, but still pushing it a lot. Mainly I'm just WAY more busy at work than in the past.
Liz: I prefer ebooks, too: far easier to read and carry around at all times. But the lack of them at the library and the fact that they're more expensive than ever (another reason I hate Steve Jobs) makes it hard to get in all the reading I want on them. Plus, like I said, I like the way the books look. They're a decorative thing I can have around, and one Mr F doesn't seem to want to take his occasional anger out on.
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