Waffle

In the next few months before I go back to Tennessee to get married, I expect to be using my media collection as my ATM a couple of times - it's a way to declutter and get back some of the money I spent on DVD's, CD's, vinyl records and books over a quarter-century. None of it is going to make me rich but there is a lot of volume to get rid of.

Today I've been sorting out some of the books that I no longer want to keep. Into the "to sell" box went:

Four Glenn Cook "Adjective Metal Noun" PI Garrett novels, the latest of which I got only last Christmas. When I first read Petty Pewter Gods in the late 1990s, I loved it, but the concept and style have lost their appeal to me, so out it goes, along with Angry Lead Skies, Cold Copper Teads and Cruel Zinc Melodies.

Four Christopher Moore novels: Fluke, A Dirty Job, Lamb and The Stupidest Angel. Another writer I used to love in the 1990s, I now find time and time that his novels are fun to read once, but then I don't want to read them again (unlike with, say, Terry Pratchett, whose novels I re-read regularly).

Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat omnibus. I still like the Stainless Steel Rat, but this recent, newly typeset reprint duplicates two novels that I already had and was riddled with punctuation errors, making me wonder if perhaps I had misremembered the style of the originals.

Steven Brust, The Book of Jherek, The Book of Taltos, The Book of Athyra. A lot of people whose opinions I respect love themselves some Steven Brust, but after three omnibus collections I can safely say that I'm just not that into him.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, a book that I've read several times. Stephenson was at one time one of my favorite writers, but this was the last one that I really liked (I gave copies to several people including my brother) and he is another writer who has lost his sheen for me - the ever increasing bloat of his work put me off it if I remember correctly, he said somewhere that his novels are supposed to end like they do, which just doesn't make sense to me. In any case, I don't want to take this big heavy trade paperback edition with me to the States; if I change my mind again, I can always re-buy it in an edition that is less of a doorstop.

That's the first batch of books I want to get rid of, but: if you are a reader of this blog and you're willing to pay shipping (or if you live in Groningen and I can just meet you to hand over one or more books), I'll happily send any one or more of them to you for free. Just let me know sometime in the next week or so, because once they're gone, they're gone.