For me, the first
quarter of this year was dominated by February, when I fled the
winter chill of London for a month of summer in my antipodean mother
land. I won’t bore you with how great it all was – great weather,
old friends, family on good behaviour, plenty of good wine and beer
and so forth. Instead I’ll bore you with far less interesting chat
about reading.
I’ve had a Kindle for
a couple of years and have taken it on holiday a couple of times, but
this is the trip it was made for. I always end up taking what I
consider a sufficient number of books (perhaps six) and then while
I’m in NZ one thing like to is search second-hand bookshops for
obscure SF paperbacks from the seventies and eighties. What I
particularly love is a small town book exchange (every small town in
NZ has got one) with a SF section that looks like it might have come
from the estate of a lonely farmer and SF fan.
I’ve done pretty well
with Jack Vance, picking up nice seventies and eighties editions from
Grafton and the New English Library with cool covers by Jim Burns, Mick van Houten and Peter Elson, etc. But this year I discovered
something that’s killed that hobby dead: The SF Gateway.
It’s changed my
holidays for ever and I may now never visit New Zealand again.
