Last post, I showed a picture of some books from my early reading days that I found in my parents’ basement.  They’re only a smattering–the ones that never were lost/loaned/stolen like many others.  They represent the tip of my sci-fi/fantasy boyhood iceberg.

Then there are the books that were never stored in my parents’ garage because I hung onto them.  They’re on my bookshelf now, either because I still read them or because I’m too nostalgic to let them go:

• Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars stories.  A Princess of Mars through Master Mind of Mars.  Massively wonderful adventure yarns with a surprisingly postmodern narrative frame.  When I read a late ’90s Gabriel García Márquez interview where he mentioned loving Burroughs, it validated my ongoing love for something that had become a guilty pleasure.
• Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates.  Hasn’t left my shelf since I bought it from a grocery store book rack.  I’ve read it more times than I can count on fingers.  Love the way he treats magic.  Has my favorite plot reversal and my favorite use of a pop song in a novel.
• The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.  Loved these, and the radio show, and the TV series.  First book I remember laughing out loud while reading.
• Doc Savage #101/102: The Pharaoh’s Ghost and The Time Terror.  They were still publishing these as two-for-one paperbacks when I was a little kid.  Glad I had this when I rediscovered Doc as an adult.
• H. P. Lovecraft. Those 1980s Del Ray paperbacks with the eerie black-and-white covers ruled.  Still, there’s something appropriately werid about them–they look very ordinary and very unnerving at the same time.

There are more.  Just not enough space/time.  And, what the hell, here’s a picture…