What the Postman Brung

It’s been like a year or so since I placed an online used book order. Though I can get really, really hard-to-find, out-of-print used books relatively inexpensively, the price generally doubles when you throw in shipping. So I treat myself once or twice a year to an alibris.com order. Just did last week, and all my books came in.

Suffice it to say, I am excited!

The first book to arrive was The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. Arguably the most famous and influential book co-written by the most famous and influential Pohl, it is astonishingly impossible to find out on the shelves. I even tried the new SF shelves at B&N (is it out-of-print?). Anyway, I picked this up because Pohl is always a good read and as an author I respect tremendously who recently died, I want to read this come the new year.

Next came one from the nostalgia files – Mathematics, from the Time Life Science Library of the late-60s. I had the whole set as a kid a decade later, and this one plus The Universe were read so often the binding wore away and pages fell out. Termites got ’em both sometime in the late 80s after a house move. I did re-read a library version of this in the early 90s when I went to Seton Hall for physics. But, man, did the memories come back as I thumbed through this mid-60s memory lane goodness.

Then an unabridged paperback of Dicken’s Great Expectations. Not out of print, but I have been unsuccessful as locating a used copy for nearly a year. I want to read this while listening to the book on tape. In part, too, because of nostalgia: my seventh-grade middle school English class read though it in 1979, and I hated it. But the intervening decades have turned me into a literary bibliophile, and I want to revisit the story again. Also, a nice experience with A Tale of Two Cities a few years back helped.

Finally, William Harrison’s Roller Ball Murder, complete with a bloodied James Caan on the cover, arrived. A collection of a dozen or so short stories, this will probably be my next read. Appeals to the boy in me and, hey, I did read this as a boy. I expect a fast, can’t-put-it-down read. Maybe this weekend, maybe the long Thanksgiving weekend after. We’ll see.

Happy reading, y’all!