Something Forgotten

I read a lot of science fiction as a young teenager. All of it from the local library, and most of it in those old yellow-jacketed Gollancz editions. I'm not sure I finished everything I started and certainly struggled with one or two books at the level of simple understanding. And for some strange reason I know I thought of sci-fi as pretty lower-class sort of reading, on the same level as the detective stories Mum loved so much. What a petty little snob I was!

I mention all this in connection with a minor crisis in my reading yesterday with regard to Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. As I pointed out a couple of days back, my reading has got more than a little undisciplined lately, yet I didn't have a novel on the go and was feeling the lack. The result was an even more complete breakdown in discipline as I took myself off to the library at work determined to grab some reasonably short work of fiction to add to my current reading - that work turning out to be the one referenced earlier in the paragraph.

Within thirty minutes of leaving the library with the book in my hand I'd read Chapter 1 and was enthralled. Which is what precipitated the crisis, sort of. It suddenly occurred to me that I might have already read the novel, despite the fact that it appeared entirely new to me, since I thought I had a couple of the lovely Library of America editions of Dick's works from the 60's and 70's and I'd read these within the last five years or so. I was horrified by the idea that I might have managed to so completely forget an entire book in such a short period. A 'senior moment' on an epic scale. Hurriedly I checked on-line at the LOA website and realised that Flow My Tears did indeed appear in one of the collections I thought I owned. I glumly found myself considering rushing to my neurologist at NUH and asking to take the test for dementia suggested earlier this year.

Then it further occurred to me that it might be a good idea to check just how many of the LOA editions related to Dick were actually on my shelves. It turned out that I possessed a solitary volume, and it didn't have the novel in it. I'm not sure why I thought I owned two volumes, but it didn't seem quite so bad losing count of editions I own as opposed to forgetting reading an entire book. Plus I could now continue my reading very happily indeed, enjoying something quite new.

Except, going back to what I said at the beginning, I can't help but wonder if I actually have read the book before, back in the dark ages of my misspent youth. And, I really should add that I'm baffled as to why I don't own all three of the LOA collections available.