Books

Got too many.....and can't get enough.

What's a boy to do? Well, he could knock out a few walls.....make the
rooms bigger and put in more shelves. But this is expensive, it cuts
into the book budget.

And then, it hit me. Go to the library. They got all the books a boy
could want, and they store them.....for FREE!

I found somebody's wallet scattered over about a hundred yards of
highway 27 last summer. Evidently she'd left it sitting on her car at
some stop or other and drove off. Took me about twenty minutes of
dodging traffic and digging through the grass and weeds on the
shoulders to find all of the contents. Like most folks in Murrica
today, she had a LOT of plastic cards in that wallet.....credit cards,
IDs, gift cards, etc. No library card.

My wallet has a lot less plastic than most.....and about half of it is
library cards. I can check out books from about fifty libraries at
last count. By sheer volume, that should be just about enough to
satisfy anyone. But sheer volume is deceptive. There's a lot of
duplication. And a lot of the stuff, duplicated or otherwise, is of
no interest. Keeps a boy moving and searching.

Naturally, a lot of good reading time is wasted in fruitless or at
least infuriating searching. Nothing much to be done about much of
it. However, there IS now a way to get around a particularly vexing
stumbling block. Many author of fiction write series of books around
certain characters. For afficianados who have read the last thrity or
so installments it probably isn't difficult to keep up with current
output.....even when dealing with those astonishing authors who seem
to put out a new book every 72 hours or so. But for the rest of us,
encountering a half shelf of books by the same author, evidently a
series to judge by the cover art or clues in the titles, can be
frustrating. Where to begin? Yeah, you can look at dates and edition
numbers on the publisher's page. Or you can simply hammer on your
toes with a particularly large volume.....it's just as much fun and
nearly as productive in the short term.

Ah, but things have changed! At last, there is an easy way to find
out what books belong to a particular series in an author's offerings
and it what order they appeared in print.

Go to:

http://www.kdl.org/

Click on the "Books & More" tab.

A set of clickable links will appear along the left side. Near the
bottom of this list is "Popular Links"

The penultimate subhead under the "Popular Links" is "What's Next
Books in Series."

Click on this.

The rest should be easy enough to figure out.

Good luck.

giles