Book Hauls!

[Mangara]

My family are now catching onto my reading habit! I received:

 

[dask]

Friend needed some help with his Amazon order so he wouldn't have to worry about postage so I indulged myself with a little Christmas present:

It's a replica but still readable and exciting to own.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Friend needed some help with his Amazon order so he wouldn't have to worry about postage so I indulged myself with a little Christmas present:

It's a replica but still readable and exciting to own.

Ooooooooooooooooh!

My palms are going all sweaty!

This was my swag for the day. I managed to get a city - albeit a very small one - and poke around some shops for the first time in ages.

More grist for the junk mountains. I collect pre ISBN penguins but have rules about their acquisition. I have to buy them in shops, not on line and not pay more than £2 for an individual book. (I can be given them or swap them on line at somewhere like readitswapit.co.uk but I can't just buy them on eBay or abebooks; that would be cheating somehow.) Despite living in the middle of nowhere, on the side of a mountain, in Scotland I have managed to collect nearly 500. Annoyingly I already had one of the penguins I bought today (The Humbler Creation) but this one is in nicer condition. I was hoping to have made it it to the 500 hundred mark by the end of the year but I am still two short. Damn!

I also find it horrifying that I have never read Fred Pohl's Drunkard's Walk when I have enjoyed just about everything else I have ever read by him.

 

[Extollager]

Recently into my hands --

William Dalrymple's first (I think) travelogue, In Xanadu:

Michael O'Brien ventures into science fiction with Voyage to Alpha Centauri:

Another volume of Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strips (note the characteristic emotion-sweat drops):

Sterry's British Birds:

 

[AE35Unit]

^British Birds in north Dakota??

 

[Extollager]

^British Birds in north Dakota??

I suppose I should've explained. I read a great deal of British literature, memoirs, etc.!

 

[dask]

Very nice find in near mint condition for a quarter:



Not just a catalog of the planets from 1962 but an honest attempt by a well respected sf author "to present a well-organized body of knowledge about our solar system, together with a number of stimulating ideas and speculations of things to come." At 288 pages it appears a vein worth mining.

 

[AE35Unit]

Never heard of this author, so I googled him then downloaded it.

 

[Fried Egg]

Just one book for Christmas this year (although it's really four in one): "The Mabinogion Tetralogy" by Evangeline Walton.

 

[AE35Unit]

I suppose I should've explained. I read a great deal of British literature, memoirs, etc.!

Ah, you visited us?

 

[Rodders]

I just received the 20 book Babylon 5 script collection.

 

[Extollager]

Ah, you visited us [in Britain]?

Only in my armchair.

 

[Extollager]

Very nice find in near mint condition for a quarter:



Not just a catalog of the planets from 1962 but an honest attempt by a well respected sf author "to present a well-organized body of knowledge about our solar system, together with a number of stimulating ideas and speculations of things to come." At 288 pages it appears a vein worth mining.

One of the earliest books to seize my imagination was the first edition of Roy Gallant's Exploring the Planets. I particularly liked an illustration of a crescent Saturn as seen from Titan. It was probably semi-plagiarized from Chesley Bonestell! The artist was John Polgreen.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Only in my armchair.

 

[Extollager]

Jack Kirby -- late DC era -- right?

 

[JunkMonkey]

Jack Kirby -- late DC era -- right?

Award yourself a coconut - Metron from The New Gods. (And about the time I lost interest in comics.)

 

[Extollager]

(And about the time I lost interest in comics.)

Me too, as far as superhero comics goes. I stayed interested in Carl Barks' Duck work.

 

[Hilarious Joke]

I bought Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace yesterday

 

[TheShadowsandSilence]

Quite a large haul over christmas and the new year, here's a selection:

True Grit - Charles Portis
Fight Club - Chuck Palahnuik
The Pity of War - Niall Ferguson
On Basilisk Station - David Weber
The Darkness that Comes Before - R Scott Bakker
Royal Flash - George Macdonald Fraser
The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 - John Carey

 

[Bick]

I just got hold of "We the Underpeople" - a collection of linked stories by Cordwainer Smith, published by Baen. I also have another Ben Bova 'Grand Tour' novel winging its way to me (Jupiter). Looking forward to them.