Latest Book Haul

Since I didn’t get to visit my used book shops in Pennsylvania this past Father’s Day (where Hopper and family spend the weekend with Hopper’s parents out in the boondocks), I made sure to get to them this weekend driving over there to pick up my girls from their weeklong vacation.  In two separate trips I bought six used books, all for about ten bucks.

What did I get, you’re champing at the bit to know?

Okay, I’ll tell you!

The New Springtime (1990), by Robert Silverberg

I read this book in the early 90s, my return to SF since a bright-eyed bushy-tailed young padawan.  Having spent a dozen or so years immersed in fantasy and horror, I found myself utterly captivating with this world Silverberg created – a world of intelligent apelike and insectlike creatures, balanced in some sort of outerworldly détente.  I think.  Can’t remember much of it, other than the all-consuming effect it had on me while I was reading it.  So, after a pleasant experience reading Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles, I picked this up without hesitation.

Dark Stars (1969), edited by Robert Silverberg

Since I so enjoyed the short stories of Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles, I also seized on this anthology of other classic SF writer’s works.  Looking forward to this …

Tales of Ten Worlds (1962), by Arthur C. Clarke

Purchased for reasons similar to the anthology above.  Never truly got into Clarke, though I enjoyed his Rama books and his Fountains of Paradise.  Will read this with an open mind, possibly looking for other Clarkian scribblings to check out.

Devil’s Canyon (1998), by Ralph Compton

This was kind of a stab in the dark.  I was looking for a decent Western for a while now; hadn’t really read one since last winter, and I’m still surprised at how much I enjoy them.  Staring at a bookshelf of Westerns in the store – must’ve been two hundred gnarled paperbacks – I was at a complete loss.  Had no idea which titles and authors were the worthy ones.  So, having heard of Compton’s name before, I scanned the back covers of the half-dozen that were his and selected this ’un.  We’ll see.

Technos (1972) and Veruchia (1973), by E. C. Tubb

Ah!  The Dumarest Saga!  How baffling and obsessively intriguing for ten-year-old spaceboy!  See here and here for details but in a sentence: SF paperback found in my father’s Mysterious Drawer of Books, began a dozen times but never completed, part of twenty-five or thirty book collection of rugged human Dumarest searching the habitable planets of the galaxy for clues of lost Earth.  A few years ago I read books 1 and 2.  This pair is 7 and 8 in the series if Wikipedia is correct.  Should be good, quick reads.

Talking apes, the Santa Fe trail, twenty worthy short stories, and Earl Dumarest.  All for ten dollars.  Forty, fifty hours of reading.  Can’t beat that entertainment value …