Lovecraft

I've been circling around H. P. Lovecraft for a long time. My first serious plunge into that lake occurred when Liveright (W.W. Norton & Company) published The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (edited by Leslie S. Klinger) with an Introduction by Alan Moore. I almost bought it, then reconsidered, found out that the library had a copy, and hied me to the pertinent branch. I read the Introduction. It was a good introduction. I read the first several stories. Not great stories, but interesting. And I like annotations. In one of these, I learned why a flashlight is called a flashlight. I'll leave it to you to follow through on that. But I pooped out after a half-dozen or so of  the stories, returned the book, and didn't really think about Lovecraft all that much again until Alan Moore reared his shaggy head with Providence . . . which was (1) a superb comic book series  (highly recommended, even if you aren't a comic book kind of person) and (2) directly related to  Mr. Lovecraft. But when the series was over, I pretty much forgot about Lovecraft again.

Until I saw this thing of beauty at Half-Price Books:

'cause, you know . . . it's a BOXED SET. I love boxed sets. Plus it's a pretty sweet price . . . six hardcover books for $30. And they're little books. I like little books. I thought pretty hard about picking it up. But then I thought, "Isn't it about time for Half-Price Books to do the coupon thing?" And I checked on that, and indeed it was about time. So I waited for that. And then, of course, I had to decide when to strike. On the 20% days? Best chance of still finding it on the shelves . . . and $6 off is nothing to sneeze at. Or the more daring 30% off days? 40%? Or even . . . that final 50% off day? That would mean contending with crowds plus risking it being sold out . . . but when I checked on the 20% days there were at least five boxes, so I decided to wait it out. And?

$15.89, baby. (Tax included.) Don't know when I'll get around to actually reading the thing as I am very busy with some Hungarians and a Lost Fleet . . . and Don Quixote, and several thousand pages of the history of philosophy . . . and a couple of Bibles and Notre-Dame des Paris . . . and the third Burroughs Pellucidar novel . . . and maybe a few other things . . . but I think having the stories broken up into smaller packages will be good for me. And I would like to see what this Lovecraft business is all about.

So there's that.