Fred's Ramblings

In many cases, when you think of a book collection you envision shelves of hardback, pristine book covers that contain all of the classics. That is not what you should be envisioning when I talk about my book collection.

My book collection consists of books that I have read (sometimes more than once) and 98% of them are fiction. That doesn’t mean I am not interested in non-fiction books, but when I read, I usually want something that doesn’t require much thought. I read for the enjoyment of reading and there is a list of authors that I am partial to and their novels run the gamut of thrillers, suspense, mystery and novels that take place during historical events. I especially enjoy books that have WWII as the background of the story.

At last count, I have just under 1100 books, (23% in hardback) and as you might expect I have them in a database. I have catalogued them for two reasons. One is to tell me how much money I have spent on the collection (way too much) and the other is to make sure that I don’t buy a book that I already possess. Since the database is online, I use my smart phone to search the database by author or title and I can see at a glance if the book I’m thinking of buying is already in my collection. Go ahead… call me cooky, weird and other names. Sticks and stones etc. I have been called worse and none of it bothers me. For those of you that are interested, here is a list of my favorite authors.

• W.E.B. Griffin
• Robert Ludlum
• David Baldacci
• Tom Clancy
• Wilbur Smith
• Daniel Silva
• John Sandford
• Harlan Coben
• Elizabeth George
• Jonathan Kellerman
• Jeffrey Archer
• Ken Follett

If you are a reader, some of these names may be familiar and as you can tell, they are some of the older novelists. Reading for me is a relaxing past time and I always look forward to starting a good book.