I found myself thinking about Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg, earlier this week. I read it a long time ago, when it was first serialized in F&SF. I can see here that that was in 1979/1980, so I would have been twelve years old.
At some point, I bought a used copy of the paperback, intending to reread it. Looking through my email, I see that that was in 2010. I never got around to reading that paperback. I went looking for it a few months ago and couldn’t find it, but I stumbled across it earlier this week. (It was in a pile under a bunch of DVDs.) As with a lot of my old paperbacks, I found that the print was too small for me to read, so I put it in my “donation” pile, which will eventually get dumped into a book donation drop box. And I added the Kindle version to my wishlist, figuring I’d buy that version eventually.
That got me looking through my unread Kindle books, which led to me discovering that I had Nightwings in my Kindle library, which I bought about a year ago, for some reason. So I started reading it this week. So far, I’m enjoying it.
Then, in the course of doing some internet searching for info on Silverberg books, I discovered that there’s a Humble bundle running right now, with a bunch of his books! So I bought that, and now I have digital copies of Lord Valentine’s Castle, and all of the other books in that series, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. So that’s cool.
I definitely have too much to read now, and I should absolutely stop buying new books. But I know I won’t. I’m eyeing up the Mercedes Lackey Humble bundle right now. I probably won’t buy that one. I’ve read a few of her books already, and liked them, but I don’t know if I want to add another 37 to my library.