The Joy of Bookstores

It's been a busy weekend; Happy Fourth to all my American readers, and Happy Anniversary to my wife and me, who celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary yesterday. We got out of town and stayed at a hotel overnight, with no kids, no dogs, and no responsibility except to each other. It was great.

Since we're in Canada, stores were still open yesterday; the usual 'COVID-rules' were in place everywhere, and I swear, I never want to see another bottle of hand sanitizer in my lifetime. I'm sick of the stuff, including and especially the smells. It's nauseating after the seventeenth time.

One of the stores we went to was a used bookstore, which I have frequented in the past. She isn't much of a fan of books and bookstores (which is amusing consider what I do), but she came in, and was delighted to find some stuff that she wanted. A couple of books on prominent nuns (Mother Teresa and Mother Angelica from EWTN fame), some self-help stuff, and some free magazines that she grabbed for homeschooling purposes. Nice haul, Honey Bunny.

For myself, I went straight to the sci-fi section to hunt down some pulp authors. And I came away with some serious scores. We showed them on FaceTime to our twelve-year-old later on that night, and his eyes totally lit up. I found Abraham Merritt's Moon Pool, E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space, Edgar Rice Burroughs Escape on Venus, and the pot of gold of the trip, H.R. Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, the ur-text of lost-world adventure fiction. I even found a copy of Wheelock's Latin Reader, which will be great for homeschooling as well.

All in all, it's quite the find. I know I've talked recently about focusing on e-books and free stuff online, but sometimes, you just have to have a physical book to hold onto and read. Especially old stuff from used book stores; there's a musty smell about them that just screams, 'buried treasure.'

What's also nice is that the owner of the store does put out stuff from local writers, so I'm going to be getting some copies of my paperbacks and bringing them down to put up for sale. I don't know if anything will come of it, but it's worth a shot.

So, hunt down the local used book store and check out what they have; you're bound to find something awesome in there. And if you just want something easily acquired that is full of adventure and excitement, check out my own fantasy novel, Arrival, the first book of the Chronicles of Meterra, available in paperback or e-book on Amazon.