Book Blogger Hop November 30th - December 6th: There Are 26 Spacetime Dimensions in Bosonic String Theory

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The hop is currently traveling about the blogosphere and is being hosted by Angler's Rest. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: Apart from being readers, many of us collect books on a specific subject or by a particular author. What books or which author do you collect?

This is actually two questions for me, so I'm going to give two answers. One for the type of books I collect, and one for what authors I collect.

As to the first, what type of books do I collect, that should be pretty easy to figure out: science fiction and fantasy books. But I'm a little more selective than that. My main focus is to collect all of the major award winning and award nominated science fiction and fantasy books, plus books that have won or been nominated for a few other lesser awards. Specifically, I collect books that have won or been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the Campbell Award, the Clarke Award, the Prometheus Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Fantasy Award, and the the World Fantasy Award. But this isn't limited to novels. I also collect compilations of short fiction that include award winning and nominated short stories, novellas, and novelette, nonfiction books related to the science fiction and fantasy fields that have won or been nominated for awards, and science fiction and fantasy movies and television shows, that have won or been nominated for awards. At this point I have a substantial portion of books (and other media) that meet these criteria, but as most of these the awards are handed out annually, I am always playing catch up.

As to the second, the list of authors whose books I collect is moderately long, but there are a few that I am somewhat more serious about than the others. My first science fiction love was Andre Norton, and I have been working for quite a while to collect all of her books. The trouble is, she was a very prolific author and a decent number of her books are out of print, so even though I have more than a hundred books by her, I still have many more to find and acquire. I also collect books by Isaac Asimov, but just like with Norton the trouble is that he was a prolific author. In Asimov's case, he was an extraordinarily prolific author, and trying to complete my collection of his works is even more difficult. I used to collect books by Robert A. Heinlein, but I believe that I have every title he ever published, so I don't collect him any more, rather I have collected Heinlein's works. I have several other authors that I am working to collect all of the fiction they have written: Catherina Asaro, Ursula K. LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Poul Anderson, and several others. My book collection is likely to never be finished. But the point of collecting is to always be hunting, so a "completed" book collection is, in my opinion, kind of sad.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: A Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Must Be at Least 25 Years Old

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: There Are 27 Bones in the Human Hand

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