Once upon a time, I had a home office, and 3 walls of it were lined floor to ceiling with loaded bookshelves. The third wall had a desk with my computer on it (a "lightning fast" 8088 processor in those days with a dot matrix printer, 640k of RAM and two 360k double-sided 5 1/4 floppy drives - state of the art!).
The books were every genre from religious (I had 29 different translations of the Bible, for instance), to science fiction, sword and sorcery, and just plain fantasy, along with technical physics and astronomy texts.
I recall one called "Gilgamesh the King" by Robert Silverberg. It was a retelling of the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh tales, but with the magic elements toned down to realistic levels - Gilgamesh's encounters with Inanna, for example, involved the high priestess of Inanna rather than the goddess herself.
Anything by Robert A. Heinlein or Robert E. Howard was a safe bet to be on the shelves.
A book titled "The Alien" by Victor Besaw was a mind bending read, but it would probably be hard to find a copy now - I don't think it was ever printed in very large numbers, and I got my copy back in 1979. It wasn't about space aliens, it was about an outsider in a fantasy world.
Andre Norton wrote a lot of stuff I read back then, too. I was surprised when I found out that he was really a she. One that sticks out in my mind is "Daybreak: 2250 A.D.", formerly titled "Star Man's Son". It's about a young fella outcast from his community due to his being a mutant, and his explorations of the world as it was 200 years or so after the last, nuclear, war.
Lately all I've been reading is post-apocalyptic stuff, in particular Franklin Horton's "Borrowed World" series and his "Mad Mick" series. It doesn't hurt that I've known Franklin for years, and he's incorporated me into his "Borrowed World" series as the inspiration for a character named "Hugh" starting in about the 5th book of the series as I recall.
Over the years, I got used to moving a lot, and eventually just stopped unpacking after a move on grounds of futility - I'd just be packing up again shortly, so why bother unboxing? The resutl of that is that most of the stuff I own is still in boxes out in my storage buildings, among them what books I have left. I might go out there in a few days and poke through them to see if I can uncover any other gems I may have forgotten.
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The books were every genre from religious (I had 29 different translations of the Bible, for instance), to science fiction, sword and sorcery, and just plain fantasy, along with technical physics and astronomy texts.
I recall one called "Gilgamesh the King" by Robert Silverberg. It was a retelling of the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh tales, but with the magic elements toned down to realistic levels - Gilgamesh's encounters with Inanna, for example, involved the high priestess of Inanna rather than the goddess herself.
Anything by Robert A. Heinlein or Robert E. Howard was a safe bet to be on the shelves.
A book titled "The Alien" by Victor Besaw was a mind bending read, but it would probably be hard to find a copy now - I don't think it was ever printed in very large numbers, and I got my copy back in 1979. It wasn't about space aliens, it was about an outsider in a fantasy world.
Andre Norton wrote a lot of stuff I read back then, too. I was surprised when I found out that he was really a she. One that sticks out in my mind is "Daybreak: 2250 A.D.", formerly titled "Star Man's Son". It's about a young fella outcast from his community due to his being a mutant, and his explorations of the world as it was 200 years or so after the last, nuclear, war.
Lately all I've been reading is post-apocalyptic stuff, in particular Franklin Horton's "Borrowed World" series and his "Mad Mick" series. It doesn't hurt that I've known Franklin for years, and he's incorporated me into his "Borrowed World" series as the inspiration for a character named "Hugh" starting in about the 5th book of the series as I recall.
Over the years, I got used to moving a lot, and eventually just stopped unpacking after a move on grounds of futility - I'd just be packing up again shortly, so why bother unboxing? The resutl of that is that most of the stuff I own is still in boxes out in my storage buildings, among them what books I have left. I might go out there in a few days and poke through them to see if I can uncover any other gems I may have forgotten.
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