Tag: glen cook

June 2010 Book Acquisitions

On By bibliorexIn Book Acquisitions2 Comments

Yes, I skipped a couple months worth of acquisitions, but I’m not going to go back and recreate those lists. Here’s what I picked up this month:

  • The first two volumes of the Complete Jack Vance (originally titled the Compact Vance Integral Edition). For a decade or so I have been kicking myself for not purchasing a copy of the original Vance Integral Edition, but now I’ll have every work of fiction Vance — one of my favorite authors — has ever written. Woo hoo! This one is a real triumph for me, and I’m very happy to have these in my collection. I can’t wait for the remaining four volumes to become available. Expensive, but oh so worth it.
  • I bought two books from Amazon (had a gift certificate to cover some of the cost): Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction (a reference work about a subset of the men’s adventure genre; expensive, but a must for my collection given my interest in the genre) and The Girl Who Played with Fire, the sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I enjoyed the first one so much that I had to pick this one up. That’s unusual because I typically don’t like blockbusters, but the first in this trilogy really surprised me with how enjoyable it was.
  • I purchased an autographed Polish edition of Glen Cook’s The Black Company. No, I’ll never, ever be able to read it but hey, for a couple bucks, why not? I’ve always found it interesting that Cook has such a following in Eastern Europe (of course, I can see that the bleak settings in his works would appeal to Eastern Europeans).
So that’s it. I acquired 5 new books and read 20, with a net reduction in my “to be read” list of 15 books. Not bad. I’m trying to have a new austerity program with my book purchases (wish me luck with that), though I am going to visit a new nearby used bookstore tomorrow. We’ll see what they have. They’re located in a dreary mall and I’ve heard that they’re a tad expensive, so I don’t have high hopes. But it should be fun, and I’m going to eat some damn fine Chinese food while I’m at the mall. Yum.