Friday, November 30, 2012

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

Book Blogger Hop

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

Book Blogger Hop     Home

10 comments:

  1. Wow...very thorough answer.

    Great job!!

    Happy Hopping!! Neither of the books below are your genres, but you can take a look if you care to.

    Stop by for my answer (below) if you like and also to see a review of THE SECRET KEEPER

    AND

    A review and E-book giveaway of MURDER TAKES TIME

    Elizabeth
    Silver's Reviews
    My answer

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like a wonderfully ambitious book collecting goal. Happy hunting finding the out of print ones!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow! I've never met anyone who only collects books because it has won awards. I like your two answers.

    Mine is pretty simple, lol.
    My answer

    ReplyDelete
  4. It sounds like a great goal. I also read science fiction and fantasy.
    I agree with you, a finished collection is a bit sad (all kinds of collections, not just books).

    My Blog Hop post

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Elizabeth: Thank you! I might check them out.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Julia Rachel Barrett: Of course. But which version?

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Susan @ Reading World: In my experience library book sales, garage sales, and used book stores are the best way to find out of print books.

    ReplyDelete
  8. @Vonnie Rivera: I didn't start collecting with getting all the award winning books as my goal. I started just as a science fiction fan, decided to read a recommended list of one hundred science fiction novels, then I decided to read the Hugo winners, and then things went from there.

    ReplyDelete
  9. @Hellen: A completed collection is like a finished book. Except you can't go back and recollect a collection.

    ReplyDelete