Christmas Treasures

This year, I told everyone I just wanted Amazon gift cards. Why? Because books, obviously. My boss gives all her employees $150 to order on Amazon every Christmas. Weirdly, I'm the only one who actually orders books from the world's biggest bookstore. Everyone else orders other stuff. Go figure. At least she knows who ordered the books.

In addition, I got a bunch of gift cards in my stocking, so I had a great Amazon Christmas. Naturally, I ordered a bunch of fantasy books. Inspirational reading, after all. Some of the stuff I got include an H.G. Wells collection of six novels, two Oz books for Garrett, a twelve-book volume of Lord Dunsany, a short omnibus of Fritz Leiber, the Planetary series of short stories by Stanley Weinbaum, and a collection of Clark Ashton Smith short stories. I also picked up the fourth and fifth books of the Early Church Fathers series, and a couple of books for my Latin course. All in all, it was quite the haul for literary goodness. And, of course, Wells, Dunsany, Lieber, Weinbaum and Smith are all pulp writers. Well, Dunsany and Wells were published outside of the pulps first, but they were incredibly influential on the pulps, and many of their writings were reprinted in the pulps anyway.

And yes, I'm reading these books. I'm putting the Latin to good use right now, and I'm slowly making my way through the Church fathers. They are a treasure trove for any Christian reader, with insights from many different men who all held to the same set of beliefs, and many of whom were declared saints later on. Most of them, in fact.

That's something I need to put on my next list: A book of saints. Learning about them is more important than learning about rock stars and athletes. After all, we don't get to be ballplayers in the afterlife, but we might be saints. It would be a good thing to aspire to be.

Now, I just need to build the bookshelves to hold all of these treasures...