I’ve been pondering this topic for a few days now, and have thought about it occasionally over the last 30 years. I go through phases of fiction reading, often going through a writer’s entire catalog, or at least a series or two when they write in that manner.

Recently I’ve been reading a writer named Marilyn Foxworthy, who is inspired by Burroughs and the pulp era, writing with a mix of allegory, sexuality and sensuality, internal monologues and soliloquys, and pop culture references. Her work isn’t for everyone, and she warns you of that in the introduction to each book. But I’ve enjoyed it.

She has almost a dozen “series” that are in various states of being written. One of the series, with two books so far, was based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter/Barsoom series. When I got to the second book of her series, I took a break from modern fiction and read the first three John Carter books. I have the rest on my Kindle now, so they’ll be covered in between other works.

Between going back to a classic writer, and running out of a modern writer’s works (at least in several series), I got to think about my two pains of fiction reading.

Waiting for new works

The late Douglas Adams was influential in my high school and college days. There was a gap in his Hitchhiker’s series, and I remember rushing to a bookstore in Muncie to get Mostly Harmless when it came out in 1992. His last Dirk Gently novel had been in 1988, and So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish was 1984, so I’d been waiting a while for that book to come out.

We weren’t as connected then as now, so my research mostly involved checking the library and Usenet occasionally for a few years here and there, and I was excited to get the book.

I probably felt something similar whenever a new Jimmy Buffett album would come out, but by the time I became a Parrothead and a tapwater Conch, it was a lot easier to keep track of these things, and listen to something on release day online, if not get it shipped from a bookseller or music store, or pick it up in person somewhere nearby.

With Adams, I read most of what he wrote. The first computer CD-ROM title I bought was “Last Chance To See,” even though I didn’t have a computer with a CD-ROM drive yet. But I felt he had done his work, and it was okay to read it all.

Running out of works

You’d think I would go on to mourn Adams’s demise in 2001 and the lack of future works by him. That was and is sad, and I remember exactly where I was sitting when I got the news of his death (a particular hotel room in Canada with my American girlfriend who lived in Canada at the time), but it didn’t feel quite the same.

My reference for running out of books from an author was more connected with Jimmy Buffett (RIP) who I seem to remember had among his three desert island books one Purple Place for Dying by John D MacDonald. I can’t find where I read that list, but he leads off Incommunicado with a mention of the author and his best known character. He also says it brought him back to Florida from French Polynesia and led to him finding his wife. The other two were Bruce Chatwin’s “The Songlines,” and one I can’t find,

I mentioned it in my Goodreads review of Seven by JDM. As I mention in the review (that I forgot about writing until about a minute before this line), I read 20 of the 21 Travis McGee novels.

I always wanted to know there was more Travis McGee to read, even if there would never be more, so The Lonely Silver Rain sits in a box somewhere in Silicon Valley, waiting for me to run out of anything else to read.

My honey says I should read it, so I can go back and start over from the beginning… and seeing that I got the last seven Travis McGee novels and The Executioners (which became the movie Cape Fear) about 17 years ago, maybe it’s time to abandon my restraint and read it.

First world pains, I’m sure

I’m usually not that superstitious, so my reaction to Travis McGee is a bit odd, but after I finished #20 in that series I did have all of Randy Wayne White, Carl Hiaasen, and Tim Dorsey to read. RWW of course was closer to JDM’s style and manner, while the others went more into the modern absurd, Dorsey even more than Hiaasen.

I’ve enjoyed some “aftermarket” Douglas Adams, including several forms of his incomplete story Shada from Doctor Who. Gareth Roberts wrote the Shada novelization based on the BBC script that was interrupted by a strike. There were two remakes/flesh-outs of it, including one narrated in the gaps by Tom Baker and another fully animated one. And of course, Chronotis and his TARDIS stuck in Cambridge became Reg Chronotis at St Cedd’s in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

On the upside, going back to Marilyn Foxworthy, she has dozens of books out, and is still working on more. I’m eager to continue the adventures of the various Jensens, and I’m hoping for another Barsoom book in particular before I finish with Burroughs.

Where do we go from here?

My Kindle is getting a workout. I’ve had an Oasis for a couple of years, and while I’m tempted the larger screen of the Kindle Scribe, I’m probably not going to make it worthwhile even with a trade-in. It is on my Amazon wishlist, in case anyone has Amazon gift cards they can’t find a use for. But if I need a larger screen before Foxworthy gets the next Barsoon volume out, I have an iPad Pro that runs the Kindle app as well.

I also just re-realized that the used bookstore in Mountain View, California, has been closed for many years. Ananda BookBuyers moved to Gilroy in 2016, and closed that store a year and a half ago. I went looking for Lonely Silver Rain at two used bookshops left in the area, but neither had it. So I’ll be getting a copy tomorrow via Amazon Prime.

Who have you read obsessively, and have you run into either of the concerns I’ve discussed here? Share in the comments.

[2023-12-10: Title updated since the books involved fit well.]