I buy a lot of books, and sometimes when I buy them I announce my purchases on twitter, the piece of software that is always in the news, the application that is famous for driving people insane. Am I buying these books in a desperate attempt to fill some kind of hole in my soul? Am I buying them in a pathetic effort to get attention from my twitter followers? Or am I buying them to read them? In an MPorcius Flashback post we take a look at some of those old twitter posts and see how many of those books that I so publicly purchased have actually been read. Today we'll assess the rate at which I have made use of purchases made in the first three months of 2015.
JANUARY 4, 2015: Mankato, Minnesota Just four days into the new year I bought eight books and a magazine in a used bookstore in Mankato, Minnesota, a town distinguished by its Godzilla statue. A month later I read Kris Neville's "Survival Problems" from Terry Carr's Universe 5 as part of a blog post about three Neville stories I interpreted as attacks on democracy. That same February I read two stories from William F. Nolan's Man Against Tomorrow, Kris Neville's "Special Delivery" and Nolan's own "And Miles to Go Before I Sleep." In 2020 I took Man Against Tomorrow off the shelf and read four more of its stories, Ray Bradbury's "Payment in Full," Chad Oliver's "Transformer," Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "I, Dreamer," and Charles Beaumont's "Mass For Mixed Voices."
February 2015 also saw me read three stories from Robert Hoskins's Infinity Four, Nolan's "Starblood," Edward Bryant's "Audition: Soon to Be a Major Production," and Barry Malzberg's "Ballad of Slick Sid." I should look at this anthology again; it has three stories by Fritz Leiber.
It looks like I have made use of all three anthologies I bought that day. What about the novels? Well, we're looking at a record of four out of five. Almost seven years after I purchased it, I read L. P. Davies's The Artificial Man. In 2018 I read Ray Cummings's A Brand New World. Algis Budrys's Man of Earth I read in April of 2015. Detective fiction icon John D. MacDonald's Ballroom of the Skies has yet to fall under the MPorcius microscope. A. E. van Vogt's Future Glitter was another of my February 2015 reads.
This January trip to Mankato really paid some dividends!
JANUARY 7, 2015: Iowa(?)
Like everybody, I'm a fan of Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, and Caroline Munro, and I also like their film
At The Earth's Core, which apparently has some detractors. So
finding a hardcover movie tie-in edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs's first Pellucidar novel, complete with photos of many of the film's monster suits as well as one of Munro, for one dollar in a thrift store in some burg I don't remember was a real score. I haven't read this copy yet, but, come on, my well-being is enhanced by owning these photos! Good purchase!
JANUARY 12, 2015: Story City, IowaRight by the highway in Story City is an antique mall and it was there that
I got a stack of Tarzan books with covers by Richard Powers (credited inside the books as "Dick Powers.") I have blogged about the first six Tarzan books (see links below this para), but I don't think I've actually read any of these Powers editions, seeing as I own a pile of later printings that are in somewhat better shape. I have, on the other hand, read the copy of
Stanton Coblentz's satire The Hidden World I bought in Story City, the edition with the awesome Ed Emshwiller cover that makes you think it will be an awesome war or adventure story and not a bunch of jokes and criticisms of society.
MARCH 21, 2015: Omaha, Nebraska
It seems I was so busy reading that I didn't buy any books worth mentioning in February of 2015 or early March.
But on the 21st of March I was in Omaha and bought nine paperbacks at the Half Price Books there. I'm afraid I've only read three of these.
Richard Lupoff's The Crack in the Sky, a long novel about pollution and overpopulation full of political chatter and digressions about Edgar Rice Burroughs and underground comix,
I read the same month I purchased it. In April I read Tanith Lee's much more impressive
Day By Night and
Don't Bite the Sun. Thirty-three percent is not a good score, and I'd be lying if I said I was planning on reading any of the six other books anytime soon. Let's call my purchase of these six books seven years ago a long-term investment. I'm quite interested in van Vogt, Lee, and Koja, so I probably really will read them someday. I read
The Genesis Machine in my youth and the only thing I remember about it are the sex scenes.
The Dragon is book two* of a five book series about a woman in a land full of dinosaurs and reptile men who ends up married to the top reptile man; I read the first book,
The Serpent, back in 2012 and
wrote a two-star review of it at Amazon. To grok
The Dragon I'd have to reread
The Serpent, and am I really going to reread a book that is like 300 pages long that I thought deserved only two stars, even if it is full of weird sex and dinosaurs? As for
Spectrum of a Forgotten Sun, it is book fifteen of a series that I think I am on book 12 of. March 21, 2015 was not my best purchasing day.
*Nota bene: This series of Jane Gaskell's has a confusing publication history, sometimes being published in four volumes, sometimes in five volumes. The Dragon is actually the second part of the first volume of the four volume version of the series.
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Regular programming will resume with the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log. If you can think of any reason why any of the unread books mentioned in this post should be prioritized by the MPorcius Fiction Log staff, do not hesitate to let us know in the comments.
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