Never seems to fail, when I decide to start a new blog series, life intervenes and said blog series disappears for about a week until I get my feet under me again. In any case, here's another installment of My Stuff, a detailing of all the miscellany crowding my "stuff" shelf, important to me and no one else...
Like many writers, I figure, I was a rabid reader growing up. I didn't read one genre in particular, I kinda wanted to read ALL THE THINGS. So, it was only a matter of time before the shelves of hardcover pulp novels in my great grandmother's trailer caught my eye. She knew of my love for reading, and she started giving me one novel every month, which turned into a novel a week, with the promise that, when she passed, I'd get the rest.
When she did pass they came into my possession, and they were marked by an amazing diversity. Classics such as Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Riders of the Purple Sage, a collection of Ellery Queen short stories, mixed in with forgettable titles such as The Nursing Home Murder and Crimson Ice, also along with several John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My father said my great grandmother went through a period in which she collected these book club editions indiscriminately, for no other reason than she wanted a collection a books. The romantic in me, of course, likes to think she was collecting them for her yet to be born great-grandson who would entertain fantasies of being a writer someday.
These books line the back of my "Stuff Shelf." I read them all, loved them, only remember a quarter of the plots, but they helped introduce me to weird and strange stories, and I hope to pass them on someday, myself.
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