Books 1988

My mother also found a list of books I read in 1988, twenty-five years ago.  Amusingly, Elfstones and Wishsong of Shannara are on the list, albeit spelled incorrectly.  Amusing because Eryn and I just finished reading them in early June.

Most of these are pretty straight forward fantasy and scifi, but Bloodland by Johnstone, a bit of conservative shoot 'em upness, stands out as the one thing that's not like the others (Ayn Rand as well, but that's not quite as strange).  I suspect I either picked up the book at the RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) library sale - which is where I started reading Dune again - or at the Monticello flea market (Osowski's Flea Market) where I used to buy Mack Boland books en bulk.  I always want to write Mac Noland when I write that, because I know Mac and he wrote a self-published thriller.  Not the same.  Mac has never killed lots of mafioso to my knowledge.  The Executioner page on Wikipedia is cool because it lists 414 Mack Boland mainline series books, not including the 158 SuperBolan books.  Ponder that.  There are 572 books between those two series.  I didn't read nearly that many, although I bet I read a good 40 or 50 minimum.  Enough that I still remember April and Grimaldi despite reading them before I could drive.

It's also sort of neat that this list survived where a computerized list, like I keep now, might not have.  Of course you can log your books in the cloud for safety - store them on Goodreads or in Dropbox - but it's an interesting slice of history that for a while we moved past paper but were reliant on either upgrading the format frequently, or losing the data permanently.



This list does make me want to reread Ellison's Deathbird Stories.  I remember it as being a bit unnerving overall.  I wonder if I'd still find it shocking in the era of Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman.  The Whimper of Whipped Dogs about the murder of Kitty Genovese is in that collection which is an amazing story.