Joe Kenney reads a Death Merchant book forty years after acquiring it. And trying to read it for the first time.
You know, I’m not a fan of that series either; I read one in in 2012 and not another. But I’m not as dedicated to men’s adventures and contemporaneous paperback originals as Kenney is.
If I want to reclaim the crown, I’ll have to read some of the young adult fiction that my sainted aunt and godmother gave me when she gave me Captains Courageous which I read in 2010 after owning it for only 30 years.
I still have a number of (or all of) the books that my aunt gave us when I was, what, eight or nine? A couple of Hardy Boys books, maybe some Nancy Drew, a Power Boys mystery, maybe the paperback copy of Henry and the Clubhouse that I would have read in elementary school (Team Cleary all the way!)–I would have read those books in the late 1970s or early 1980s. But there were also a couple of mid-century kid-and-horse books and kid-and-dog book which I really wasn’t into at the time. And, to be honest, my boys never even got into the young adult mystery adventure stories at all.
I can probably read to reclaim the crown.
Sometime after I clear the current stack on the side table. I could reclaim the title and leave a book or two in reserve for if I ever have to reclaim it again.
