I live!
If one can call existence without regular reading “living.” Ah, the demands on a startup pickle farmer!
Despite my lack of disposable time, I’ve still been adding to my collection and building up a stock for my progeny. It’s yard sale season, and I’ve been hitting some up on Saturday mornings recently. Yard sales can be a great way to find older books, often (though not always) for dirt cheap. Of course it’s not always easy to find sales with people unloading older SFF, but you never know what you’ll find! Last weekend an otherwise unassuming collection of XBox 360 sports games and used phone cases turned up a couple of vintage children’s illustrated Tarzan books. Unfortunately they were in pretty rough shape, so I passed on them.
At another sale, I found a pile of Lloyd Alexander books for a buck each (and I haggled one free, of course).
I wasn’t familiar with Alexander until relatively recently, but he made quite a mark on the Fantasy sub-genre, especially as a writer of young adult stories. If you’ve ever seen the somewhat obscure Disney flick The Black Cauldron, you’ve encountered his work. Though it’s not obvious from the movie version, The Black Cauldron is actually the second book in his Prydain series.
So anyway, I was able to add books 3 and 4 to my collection; I just need to find the last one now! I also grabbed all three books in his Westmark series, and a standalone called The Iron Ring, which I understand is heavily influenced by Indian culture and mythology.
Get yard saling!
There are surprising finds in little free libraries, too
Yes! I got a nifty little scifi collection out of one of those.
Glad to see you are not dead…
I rarely see any books, let alone SFF at yard sales, but I like to hit them up because they usually have cheap kids stuff, so I can keep an eye out.
Glad to hear you’re still breathing.
Good to see you are still among the living!
IMO, the Prydain series is the best YA/juvenile stuff ever written. Great themes and immortal characters. It’s been 10-20yrs since I read any of them and I can still name every main character and many of the secondary characters. Oh, and the various supernatural foes (like the Huntsmen and the Cauldron-Born) are frikkin’ great. My highest recommendation. The “Westmark” books are quite good as well.
Au revoir….
hit me up if you come back online again a little more regularly.
You got it, man. I’ll write another post if I ever start reading regularly again. =P
Man I am itching for some Vance…
Life.
Whatcha going to do?