reading — BLOG — ANTHONY R. CARDNO

Lifted from RoofBeamReader‘s Friday blog:

Q. Inspired by the inane Twitter trend of #100factsaboutme, give us five BOOK RELATED facts about you.

1. As I’ve said before, I cannot read too many books in the same series or the same genre or even by the same author in a row. I start to burn out on the subject or style. I need to alternate things, to keep my reading fresh.

2. My Book Review Pet Peeve: I get intensely agitated reading reviews that are 90% plot synopsis. I do NOT need you to tell me every plot twist in your review — if you give me every detail of the book, why should I bother reading it? Quote the back cover or inside front flap synopsis, and then tell me what you thought of the book.

3. Like many of my reader friends, I’m a bookaholic. I have purchased far more books than I will ever get around to reading. I’m also a completionist. Once I start collecting a series, I have a compulsion to continue purchasing the series. I haven’t read anywhere near all of the Hamish Macbeth or Sister Fidelma mysteries but I own almost all of them because of this compulsion. Likewise George RR Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice.

4. My latest obsession? Rebuilding my collection of Perry Rhodan paperbacks from the 1970s. I had a good three-quarters of the run when I was in high school, but they were sold off at some point. Thanks to finding three books late in the series at a Half-Price Books in Fort Worth two years ago, my interest was rekindled and I’ve been picking them up as I find them. When I fill in the early installments, I plan to start rereading them in order.

5. I used to be able to read anywhere, anytime. As a kid I could read in the back of our Vega Hatchback, facing backwards; I could read on buses. Now, I get motion sick reading in any vehicle except trains (as long as I’m facing the direction the train is moving) and planes.

There we go, 5 fun bookish facts about me for this Monday blog.

I discovered as I was getting ready to go to dinner that there is a Half-Price Books on the other side of my hotel. Hadn’t noticed it because Sunday night I ate in the hotel restaurant, and last night I went across to the Mall where the Cheesecake Factory is and purposefully avoided going into the Borders in the Mall (my excuse was that I was carrying my hardcover IT with me, and didn’t want to deal with explaining to the bookstore staff that it was mine and that I didn’t rip the dustcover of the book off in order to steal it. Plus, I was bloated from dinner and just wanted to come back to the hotel.).

It’s no secret that I have a love affair with the HPB chain. We don’t have them in NJ or NY so the closest to my home are the three locations in Pittsburgh. I tend to end up in HPB stores when I’m in Pittsburgh and Dallas, and one of these days I will get to the locations in Cincinnati and Chicago. And hopefully we’ll keep using this hotel in Seattle and I’ll return to this store as well.

You can guess what I did tonight. Yeah. I skipped going out to dinner in order to wander HPB for an hour. Hey, I had more than half of my dinner from last night in the fridge, and that was essentially a full meal in itself.

I got a pretty decent haul for about $35.

Ever since I started getting interested in the Wold-Newton concept again, thanks to winscotteckert mostly, I’ve been attempting to fill in some old series. August Derleth and Basil Copper’s SOLAR PONS books. Various Edgar Rice Burroughs series, esp. the MARS and VENUS books. Philip Jose Farmer’s various Wold-Newton-connected works. And Sax Rohmer’s FU MANCHU series.

This HPB had 7 Rohmer books: PRESIDENT FU MANCHU, THE ISLAND OF FU MANCHU, THE BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, EMPEROR FU MANCHU, THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, THE HAND OF FU MANCHU and THE SHADOW OF FU MANCHU. Picked them all up for about #3 each. also got Farmer’s FLIGHT TO OPAR, LB Greenwood’s SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE CASE OFSABIN HALL, John Gardner’s THE REVENGE OF MORIARTY, and a Gardner F. Fox pulp SF book, THE HUNTER OUT OF TIME.

I now have all of Gardner’s three Moriarty books, and two of Greenwood’s three Holmes books. I’m still missing 6 of Rohmer’s original FU books and every Fu Manchu book written by other folks.

So, a Half-Price Books store by my hotel when I don’t have a rental car, and my little “to buy” notebook in my luggage, and the store had stock I was looking for … definitely a harmonic convergence of some kind!