Eek!

[desperance]

I have a rereading mood upon me; and this is not, absolutely not the time to discover that apparently I only have three out of the four James Blish 'Cities in Flight' novels. I saw an omnibus of all four just a week or so back, on sale secondhand: and did not buy it, because I knew so confidently that I had them all already.

Eek!

Comments

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

That Blish has a lot to answer for. Specifically:

When I was a lad, my teacher decided to put me in for an Eng Lit O level at some alarmingly premature age, having noticed that I read a lot. The nuance she'd missed was that I was a geek prodigy and _only_ read SF.

It all went well until the day of the exam, which featured a very large question about travel books, of which I'd read none, but I reasoned that Cities in Flight involved travel on a huge scale, so would work as a super stimulus.

I think it's always helpful to begin one's academic career with a good solid failure.

[julesjones]

You see, this is why you need a LibraryThing account, and a PDA so that you may carry a portable version with you...

:-)

Aside from that, yes, that sort of thing is very annoying. You have my deepest sympathies.

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Missing Blish books - I spent fifteen years longing for the copy of Black Easter that went walkabout at college. By the time I found one I had a comprehensive collection of Tom Disch and was a member of the Philip K Dick Appreciation Society (its what you call a slippery slope . . . with this huge, sheer cliff at the bottom!)

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

That's how I, conversely, ended up with three copies of an Edward Gorey collection.

And for slightly different reasons, a dozen copies of The Fifth Elephant. (The reasoning there, if there was any, was that there was a big! pile! of! Pratchett! books! MINE! ALL MINE! I saw them, and the need to BUY THEM was overpowering. I subsequently gave them all away, but it was rather strange and slightly frightening to be on the inside of.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know that feeling. If there is a supply, you need to be in control of it. Mostly I resist, tho' I did once buy a remaindered pile of "Meanwhile" by Max Handley, just so's I'd have copies to hand out to my friends. What I stupidly didn't do was buy a pile of first editions of Philip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' ('The Golden Compass' to you, I think?) when I found 'em being sold off for a few quid each. They're worth thousands now. Sigh.