Filling the Gaps

Some people say I have an obsession with books and collecting them. To those people, I laugh and say, 'obsession is such a mild word.'

While 2023 wasn't a banner year for collecting books, I did get some nice prizes from both online sources and used book stores here on Prince Edward Island. One of the things I have is a complete collection of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, all fourteen of them. Garrett (the youngest) has read a couple of them with me, but he's lost interest lately, so we're still working on the third book, Ozma of Oz. I remember it being a fun book to read when I was a kid, but he's somewhat flighty with his reading choices.

I also started re-collecting an author I enjoyed when I was younger: Terry Brooks. I know, a lot of old-school fantasy readers blame him for basically copying Lord of the Rings with the Sword of Shannara and making 'epic Tolkien pastiche' the dominant genre of fantasy for an entire generation until J.K. Rowling published Harry Potter and started a new trend. Well, that's basically true, although he definitely has his own style, and the rest of the books in the original trilogy were very different from Sword. And he's done a lot of other books in the world of Shannara, including some prequels that confirm that Shannara is just our world in the distant future after a massive nuclear apocalypse. Not the most original premise, no, but it still reads well. I've got about half of his books now, thanks to a great find at the Salvation Army where I picked up about ten of them at once for about five bucks.

Not to neglect the mystery genre, I picked up a few books at thrift stores by Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner. By no means do I have even a majority of the books by any of those writers, but it's nice to have some of them back after a long time without. It's great inspiration for the Cameron Vail books, after all.

Back to fantasy, and I found a bunch of books collecting Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories from the 1930s and 1940s. I'm only missing one book to complete that set, which of course is a foundational work for Dungeons & Dragons. Good stuff, very gripping. I've also collected a few more of the 'Appendix N' books, although they can be hard to come by since gamers have been collecting them for a long time now.

Finally, I mentioned yesterday that we're taking a trip to France in 2025. One of the stops we will be making is to Vimy Ridge, one of the most important historical battles in Canadian history. And to prepare for that, I picked up a copy of Pierre Berton's Vimy. I read it years ago, and it's a great book with tons of detail provided by men who were actually there. For those who don't know, Berton is a Canadian author and historical writer who wrote a bunch of books on Canadian history in his lifetime. Older Canadians will remember him; he was a familiar face on various TV shows during the 1970s and 80s. I grabbed a few more of his books over the course the past year, and I have six or seven of them now. They are great reads, covering all sorts of topics such as the Canadian Railroad, the Depression, Confederation, etc. I highly recommend them for anyone interested in Canadian history.

No big-ticket books this year, although I'm hoping to get some of the missing volumes from the Great Books series; a flood back in Ontario ruined about half of the set, and I haven't been able to replace them yet. Here's hoping. Ideally, if I could add a few things to my library this year, I would want to get some more of the writings of the Early Church Fathers, finish the Terry Brooks collection, fill the gaps in my Great Books set, and some more mysteries, particularly by the aforementioned trio of authors.

How about you? Any books you added to your collection, or things you're on the lookout for in 2024? Let me know. Maybe we can help each other find them.