I received an ABC Books gift card for Christmas, and it took me all of two days to get across town to spend it. Because I’m into delayed gratification.
Gift cards are strange creatures; when I have a gift card for anything, it takes me a bit of time to spend it because I’m worrying about whether to get this rather than that. So I wandered the aisles a bit at the outset of my journey, wondering how I would spend the whole amount–$100, so not a small amount.
So I picked up four paperbacks tied to the old television show Kung Fu, which totaled like fifteen dollars, and wandered around through the fiction, drama, and poetry sections, but nothing caught my eye. I went looking for the philosophy section, and before I got there, I found a shelf of Easton Press/Folio Society books at 25% off. Well, that’s a way to spend some money. I picked up Julius Caesar’s The Gaulic and Civil Wars, which I meant to add to my Christmas list after reading Last Seen in Massilia, and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I put back a couple that I might try to acquire sometime in the future.
The six books in hand ate up the gift card, so of course I picked up a couple more, including Zane Grey’s Wilderness Trek and, having finally found the philosophy section, Existentialism and Thomism.
Here they are in blurry glory:
I also picked up a couple comics and learned they were $1 each; the titles include things based on old serials (Conan, Doc Savage, Tarzan, Flash Gordon), an X-Men 2099 title, and the first issue of an undoubtedly short series tied into the television cartoon MASK.
It was a good trip; as so many of these are wont, they make me want to read a bunch. So if you excuse me, I shall.
Looking forward to your series on Miles Mayhem…
Strangely enough, I didn’t watch MASK for some reason. I think it came on right after GI Joe, though, so I often heard the intro music, which I loved.
As a matter of fact, I taped the intro song onto a cassette from the television, and I often played it while playing on my Atari 2600 for an extra boost.
Man, you can’t get more 80s than that without a mullet, and I did not have a mullet until 1991.