Monday, August 19, 2019

Hoarding an Author

Books, reading and writing are my life, so it's odd that I sometimes write about NOT reading.

When I was 12 or so, my introductions to science fiction were John Wyndham's novels "Day of the Triffids" and "The Kraken Wakes." I read them both every summer from then on. I collected pretty much every novel and story collection by Wyndham after that, and I read "The Chrysalids," "The Midwich Cuckoos" (aka "Village of the Damned"), "Chocky", etc. Then I came to a complete stop.

Why? I discussed this phenomenon with a pen-pal way back when people actually wrote letters to each other: finding a favorite author, collecting his/her books -- then stopping cold turkey. We determined that we were saving books for our old age. Yep, if we read everything by our favorite authors now, we would have nothing to look forward to, as if no one else was ever going to write an enjoyable book.

Well, now old age is bearing down on us, or me at least, so it's time to pull out our "saved" books like wine of ancient vintage. Cheers!