 It is time again to talk about the past month's reading. I'm going to talk about the thrift store at the local library again. I've been talking about that a lot recently. I picked up this batch of stuff here. A DVD of The Great Escape for $2 thanks to the library. Audio book, Charles Caralts America. Four cassette tapes. Another couple of audio tapes. A CBC radio performance of Waiting for a Godot. Another audio tape cassette. Red Wall Book 1. The Wall. I don't know what this is. I've never heard of it before. It's from the 1980s it looks like. Apparently it's about mice. Living in some sort of medieval anthropomorphic world. Interesting. Alright, at the dollar store just down the street. I found the DVD of the original Wicker Man. $2. This is the hell of a movie. If you've never seen this movie before, you should see it. It's weird. It's really freaky. But anyway, original Wicker Man is very much worth a watch. Here's another thing I got in just before the end of July. It's a collection of short stories by Joanna Russ. The Hidden Side of the Moon. I don't know anything about Joanna Russ. I bought this because she was mentioned in passing by Clifford DeSimmack in an audio interview from the 1970s. I posted a link to it on the Tumblr. Give that a listen. He mentioned her in passing and that made me think, Joanna Russ, I know that name, so I looked her up. The only thing I can glean from reading about her is that she was aggressively feminist. And we'll find out. Now, to books that I read this month. I finally got this book in. This is The Blade Runner. The actual Blade Runner. Ridley Scott saw this book by Alan Enors and he thought the title sounded badass. So he made an arrangement with Alan Enors to use the title for his movie, which has nothing to do with the Blade Runner. It makes me angry to this day. Anyway, I got the original. I finally read it. I've been wanting to for years. It stinks. And I'll review it later. Okay. Alistair Reynolds, Galactic North. It's a collection of short stories and they're excellent. I did a review of Zima Blue a couple of years ago. That is another collection of Alistair Reynolds short stories. And this is Every Bit Is Good. Classic science fiction in the big picture sense. Grand Vision, Alien Technologies. Now, this was a new acquisition for July. Stephen King's Under the Dome. I saw a couple episodes, the first few episodes of the television series and I thought it was interesting. I liked the premise. So I thought, I'm going to get the book and see what this is actually about. Look at the size of this. It's bigger than the Bible. I had never read Stephen King before. Seriously. I had never read a Stephen King novel before and I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. But, it turns out I couldn't put it down. And I went through this in a week. For me, that's lightning fast. And I will definitely review it later and give it a thumbs up. At the same time I ordered this Under the Dome book, I ordered this, Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. And I had seen somebody tweeting a week or so earlier about how they would never forgive the makers of the movie for the changes they made to this story. And I said, you know, I've heard that all my life. I've always heard that. I'm going to get this stupid book and see what the problem is. Well, and it's terrible. It sucks. It's awful. Is this what normal people consider literature? Because it stinks. I may do a special just about this book and talk about the differences between science fiction and the rest of literature. That would be worth talking about because this book is not. Something that I forgot to mention in the last monthly roundup. These I had gotten sometime over the last couple of months. 12 issues of fantasy and science fiction magazine. 12 back issues. These are not consecutive. The first one is from 1979. The last one is from 1982. But these are ones that I didn't have. Fantasy and science fiction magazine is always worth getting. I have never been disappointed in an issue of fantasy and sci-fi. I mean never. And the magazine's been going on since, I think 1940 or so. In my last video I recommended anthologies of short stories to look for. Particularly by certain editors. This is a good substitute for that. Ordering stacks of back issues of fantasy and science fiction magazine. You will find excellent stories in every issue. Alright, finally I'm going to talk about that picture that I used to open this episode. 26 volumes in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. 26 of them. 50 cents a piece. That's $13. I've never read Terry Pratchett before. I've never read Discworld. One of the reasons I never bought these books before is because there's so many of them. It's intimidating to start any series. Much less one that has, the whole series has more than 40 books in it, I think. I looked up this picture here that gives you an overview of where you might want to start and there's a number of different starting places. I decided to start at one of these standalone books called Pyramids. And when I'm reading so far I'm really enjoying it. It is a lot like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And I will definitely review that book and I'll talk about the collection next time. You can support 30 Seconds Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below. And visit the 30 Seconds Sci-Fi Tumblr, that's my headquarters. In addition to my videos, I publish links and updates there every day.