i only have three stephen king books left on my shelf.

1) the tommyknockers
2) the bachman books (rage, the long walk, roadwork, the running man)
3) the stand (complete & uncut)

but, i had a big list of them, which also included:

- carrie
- salem's lot
- the shining
- night shift (short stories)
- the dead zone
- firestarter
- cujo
- danse macabre
- different seasons (shawshank redemption, apt pupil, the body, the breathing method)
- pet semetary
- the talisman
- thinner
- skeleton crew (short stories)
- it
- misery
- the dark half
- four past midnight (the langoliers, secret window secret garden, the library policeman, the sun dog)
- needful things
- gerald's game
- dolores clairborne
- nightmares & dreamscapes

i never read christine, and regretted it. the only other thing that's missing here is the dark tower series, which i skipped on purpose. that is otherwise an almost entirely complete stephen king bibliography, up to the end of 1993.

i'm not exaggerating - i went through all of this stuff over the years 92-94. that's like 10,000 pages of stephen king, mostly in the middle of the night. the move from my mom's to my dad's was the summer of 1994, and while there were some perks attached to it, i initially had to give up my all night reading habit because he would actually storm downstairs and tell me go to fucking sleep, whereas my mom was herself usually up all night chain smoking and watching tv. i also became much more interested in the guitar after mid-94.

am i going to buy all of those books? yeah. and, i'm going to move through this sequentially.

i don't know how much these cost, nowadays. you used to be able to get them at the drug store for $5. let's see what i can get shipped to me. and, i'll have to hit the local used stores afterwards.

but, i'm going to start with asimov, because that's more primordial for me. even as i'm pointing out that i don't remember doing a single book report from grades 7-9, i know i did a book report on the foundation series in grade five. i was in a split 5/6 class, so i didn't have english class in grade six (and didn't have math class in grade five). in hindisght, it is baffling, but my mom freely sent me to that school solely because it had a large yard. yeah. the foundation series was recommended to me by the teacher, and i ended up reading a bunch of his other stuff. asimov died in 1992 with a massive bibliography, but i remember these specifically:

- the complete robot
- caves of steel
- naked sun
- robots of dawn
- robots and empire
- the stars, like dust
- currents of space
- pebble in the sky
- prelude to foundation
- forward the foundation <----did not read this one
- foundation
- foundation and empire
- second foundation
- foundations edge <----- that was the book report
- foundation and earth

so, i read through that over 1992-1993. i should collect it all, and review it all as a starting point. all i have right now is foundation and empire, and a book of short stories called the martian way.

what else did i mention?

arthur c. clarke.

i had:

- 2001: a space odyssey
- 2010: odyssey two
- 2061: odyssey three
- songs of distant earth
- tales from planet earth

my grandmother bought me these books by accident, starting around 91. she was trying to buy me greek mythology, to have me understand my name sake. i don't think she ever read any homer herself, nor had my mother, but she was trying to give me a story about jason and the argonauts, by giving me what she thought was the odyssey. d'oh? well, i enjoyed them, nonetheless, so she kept buying them. i eventually read both some plato and homer in high school, as well as some aristophanes in first year. fuck aristotle.

the only one i have left is songs of distant earth, which helpfully is dated to the christmas of 1993. so, we can go through that one together for an early '94 post.

bradbury.

- the martian chronicles
- farenheit 451 <----- not actually, but if i'm going to do this...
- a medicine for melancholy
- r is for rocket
- i sing the body electric
- dinosaur tales

i remember the bradbury a lot less. i know i at least flipped through these ones.

i do remember some specific hg wells:

- time machine
- island of dr moreau
- war of the worlds

and also some jules verne:

- journey to the centre of the earth
- twenty thousand leagues under the sea

the wells & verne were probably the result of the influence of my aunt on my mother and grandmother, who was an english major at mcgill in this period.

i'm going to push the clancy, koontz & rand forward a few years, because my memory of it is specifically connected to my dad's house. there was some crichton, too.

there would have also been some twain read over this period, again thanks to nana:

- tom sawyer (daa-da da-daaaa)
- prince & pauper
- huck finn

what else?

we'll skip the shell silverstein. that sidewalk has ended.

i was given a copy of james and the giant peach, but i...i want to say i was too old for it, but i actually probably wasn't. i felt too old for it. frankly, i thought it was a stupid thing to waste one's time with, and didn't bother with it very far. i remember reading through about half of it one night when held physically hostage by my grandmother due to a babysitting task due to not having anything else to do, and i just found myself ridiculing roald dahl at the age of, like, 9. i never found myself immersed in fantasy novels - never went for the tolkien or the lucas or really any of that stuff. as soon as you started bringing in, like, elves and shit, i lost interest.

the purpose of this post is to build a list, and we will probably leave a lot of this behind. i'm going to start with asimov, check prices, and move from there.