I bought a book on 'Buy a Book Day', did you?

A slightly later post than normal for a Saturday; it's actually sunny here (for a change) so we had to make the most of it. You understand... :o)  Anyway...

I actually ended up buying two books yesterday; partly because I thought I'd take up the slack, for those who weren't book buying, but mostly because it's me and I saw more than one book that I liked the look of. I made my purchases in Any Amount of Books, a second hand book shop that you absolutely have to go in the next time you're on the Charing Cross Road. It's a rare time indeed that I leave without at least one new (old) book tucked under my arm.

Enough of me though, the books themselves can have a word or two...

In the Matrix of cyberspace, angels and voodoo zaibatsus fight it out for world domination and computer cowboys like Turner and Count Zero risk their minds for fat crumbs.

Turner woke up in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him. They let him recuperate for a while in Mexico, then Hosaka reactivated his memory for a mission more dangerous than the one that nearly killed him.

The head designer from Maas-Biolabs is defecting to Hosaka, or so he says. Turner has to deliver him safely, and the biochips he invented – which are of supreme interest to other parties, some of whom are not human. Count Zero is human. Indeed, he’s just a kid from Barrytown, and totally unprepared for the heavy duty data coming his way when he’s caught up in the cyberspace war triggered by the defection. With voodoo on the Net and angels in the software, he can only hope that the megacorps and the superrich have their virtual hands full already.

This was a bit of a no-brainer. I enjoyed this book years ago, and then somehow let it go to a charity shop, so when I saw it on the shelf I knew that I had to read it again. I love the covers as well. I still need to re-read 'Neuromancer' but 'Count Zero' won't be too far behind after I do.

Rudyard Kipling was a major figure of English literature, who used the full power and intensity of his imagination and his writing ability in his excursions into fantasy. Kipling, one of England's greatest writers, was born in Bombay. He was educated in England, but returned to India in 1882. He began writing fantasy and supernatural stories set in his native continent, such as 'The Phantom Rickshaw' and 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes', and his most famous weird story is 'The Mark of the Beast' (1890), about a man cursed to transform into a were-leopard. This Masterwork, edited by Stephen Jones, Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed anthologist, collects all Kipling's weird fiction for the first time; the stories range from traditional ghostly tales to psychological horror.

I didn't even know that Kipling had been a writer of weird fiction but there you go. I'm collecting the Fantasy Masterworks series the old fashioned way (i.e. go into a second hand book shop and see if there's anything there) so this was another no brainer really. The odd thing though was that as my eyes scanned the shelf the book wasn't there first time round. The second time my eyes went over the shelf (like, a couple of seconds later) there it was, shoved in the space between the top of the books and the shelf above. I'll swear it wasn't there before and I didn't move so no-one else could have put it there. It was almost like the book wanted me to pick it up... So I did :o) Couldn't resist it.

That's me then, did you buy a book on 'Buy a Book Day'? Leave a comment if you did.