When I say book prowl, it means I’m currently searching for specific books to add to my collection. I usually do this activity every few years and this involves collecting books from a specific author.
I first did this in early in college when I started building my JRR Tolkien collection. I frequented bookstores and discount book stores to build up the collection. I hit the jackpot when National Bookstore did its annual Cut Price Book Sale and displayed several of the Christopher Tolkien-edited books that discussed how JRR Tolkien built Middle-Earth.
The next time I did the book prowl was between 4th year college and my early working years. This time, I hunted for David Eddings’ works – The Belgariad (five books), The Mallorean, related books (three in total), The Elenium (three books), and The Tamuli (three books). Technically, I’m still on a book prowl since I’m still completing Eddings’ Dreamers series.When I do my book prowl, aside from the standard bookstores, I also hit the discount book shops like Book Sale and Books for Less where golden nuggets can often be found.
So why do I book prowl? That’s basically because I love reading. A day for a book lover can’t be complete without picking up a book, a newspaper, a comics or a magazine and spending at least five minutes reading several pages. Nowadays, I don’t get to read as much as I want to but I still manage to sneak in a few pages every now and then during the day.
And my book collection tends to be 90% on the sci-fi and fantasy side which makes book-hunting a more tedious task since most of the discount book shops don’t arrange their titles by genre. So, I loved it when a discount bookshop in Ayala Center Cebu arranged their collection via genre. It made choosing a book easier and therefore faster. I wish Book Sale will arrange theirs as well.
One of my more recent book prowls involved searching for the Dune books by father and son Frank and Brian Herbert. I’m still missing several books involving the Classic Dune series but I’ve completed the Prelude to Dune novels, and the Legends of Dune novels. I still have to buy The Road to Dune and according to the Dune website, I’m still missing Hunters of Dune, one of two of the remaining Dune saga books based on writing left by Frank Herbert. The other has yet to come out – Sandworms.
There are still more books I’m eyeing out there like the Narnia Chronicles, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and other titles suggested by sci-fi and fantasy lovers like myself. Plus, the Oz books – an early influence alongside Lord of the Rings that first spurred my love for this genre, sometimes grouped together with the magic realism, horror, slipstream, and historical fiction genres as speculative fiction.
Now, the internet is a great source of reading material and then there are e-
books. Yet, nothing beats having a real book to open and flip pages with and immerse with and travel to different lands and worlds. Besides, reading hours upon hours on the monitor is a strain on the eye. Give me a good book anytime.And as I’ve said, I’m on a book prowl right now. I’m trying to complete the Redwall Series by Brian Jacques. Last week I scored Mattimeo from a Book Sale branch located across the street (from RCBC) and that makes my Jacques collection into four. There are still several in the series and once I have more time, I’m sure I can prowl the book shops again and do some hunting … book hunting, that is.
