Strange Complaints

Have you ever been in the middle of a wave of nostalgia so fierce you purchase seven paperback books all at once, because you read them long ago when you were a teenager? That’s what I did this past week.

I purchased all seven volumes of Isaac Asimov‘s foundation series.

It wasn’t because of the television show or anything like that but rather because I started missing my dad and thought about his collection of science fiction books he used to have on our hallway bookshelf.

My childhood home’s main hallway cut a left at the end where my room was, though my doorway was to the right of that, which left a blank wall.  I’m not sure bookshelves necessarily go at the end of a hallway, but my mother apparently thought this one did.

On it was a mixture of board games, paperback books, comic books, and on the top shelf hardcover books that belonged to my dad. If you knew my dad, you knew he was more of a paperback book kind of guy, especially the kind you could fit in your back pocket.

So the hardcover books were an anomaly.

Even more an anomaly with the fact that they were all science fiction books and my dad was not a big science fiction reader.

Apparently the exhaustion of having me as a child wiped away all his energy for speculative fiction.

These were books from before i arrived and they were all science fiction book of the month club editions. There were a few Harlan Ellisons,  some Ray Bradbury, handfuls of other assorted authors, and two Isaac Asimovs.

One of those two was the original foundation trilogy collected in one volume, which is directly responsible for the nostalgia that had me spending about $32 for a set of paperback books.

Somewhere in a box in my carport, I may even have some of my dad’s science fiction books but oddly enough I wouldn’t want to read those.

Those are still dad’s and I want the last time I read from them to be from when they were his and he was here. Which is why I bought my own copies and have read four already.

Who else is reading something they used to read because of a parent?

I’d love to hear about it….