Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Thanks to Netter for the comments yesterday and three days ago. Sorry that I only got around to acknowledging it this late.

There are times when I'm on the fence about a certain writer and his work is good, so I would read it first knowing that it has a sequel just so that I could see whether or not I'd be drawn in enough to want to get the other books.

There also have been times when I have not bought a particular book I was undecided about just because it was part of a trilogy or some such.

On the other extreme, there were two times when I was burned buying all the books before reading them. In the first instance, it was "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" by Stephen R. Donaldson. Even though I got all three books eventually ("Lord Foul's Bane", "The Illearth War" and "The Power That Preserves"), I got turned off at the time getting to the part where the main character is diagnosed with leprosy. Add to that the fact that there are now five (and soon to be seven) more books in the series.

This may be one of those books I just donate to the school library without having read it, and may simply refrain from putting my name on the inside front cover that it came from my shelves.

The second instance, I actually finished the trilogy James P. Hogan's Giants series "Inherit the Stars", "The Gentle Giants of Ganymede" and "Giants' Star". The first one was only mildly interesting in that it puts forth a mystery of contradictions of the Moon having been around Mars at one time, a twist that I predicted halfway through the book and was dragged out.

The second and third books only increased my dismay at the poor storytelling, and the apparent lack of foresight in the progression of the plot from the first to the third book.

So now anything by this guy I see in the science fiction section of the bookstores, I drop. Won't be taken by that masochism twice.

Session 1993 has been burned, but will still continue to read books. Class dismissed.