Revisiting Richard Brautigan, Where have all the paperbacks gone?

It's January 2023 because it's always been January 2023. I'm tucked away in our little house in old town Longmont. I want to while away these cold winter days. I've got a half assigned, if not totally arbitrary reading list. I want to reread all these Richard Brautigan books.

At one point I had all these books. Somewhere along the line I lost all these books. I carried a few around, but many of them I lent to people who have not brought them back to me. Perhaps the old owners of the used books have come back either as criminals or ghosts and reclaimed their property. I realized there were a good many of these books that I did not have on my sagging bookshelf.

I'm old. I started looking for these book right here in Longmont at both of the used bookstores in my neighborhood. There were none there. I knew this was going to be the case, but I went in anyway. Any day in a bookstore is a good day.

I have a mistress, a really dark one. This mistress's name? Ebay.

I made a list of all the Brautigans that I did not have and I bought them on Ebay.

Not everyone gets Ebay. I love it. I explain it like this: Amazon is like a really big Walmart. I don't like either Amazon or Walmart. Ebay is like going into the world's largest flea market and I think flea markets are great. The only real downside I see to Ebay is that I don't get a churro when I log into it like I do when I go to the flea market.

I spent all year 2003 driving all over the country stopping in all sorts of towns and cities hunting up Brautigans in the bookstores. I found, at that time, that if I did find a Brautigan it was almost always in a bookstore in or west of Denver.

I spent about three hours in 2023 finding everything I wanted on Ebay. My how the world has changed.

As I started my journey again it was with Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill vs the Springhill Mine Disaster.

They were all pretty much the way I remembered them to be. I like the short episodic chapters. We'll see how the next groups will treat me.