Episode 903: Ted Dekker Buying Spree!

Just blew more than £120 on acquiring all of the books in Ted Dekker's The Books of History Chronicles series. It's 16 books in total, so if you work out the average cost, it's pretty much the standard retail price of a paperback published in the UK, although these are all from Thomas Nelson in the USA. He's got plenty of other books, but they're mostly thrillers, which I'm not as keen to get my hands on. I mean, I enjoyed Adam, and Dekker seems to be really good at marrying the conventions of thriller novels with Christian themes, but I don't think anything in his work quite approaches the epic scope of the series I just bought. It was hard work though, tracking all of them down. Had to order from both Amazon UK and The Book Depository. I'm usually quite reluctant to get books from the latter, even though I've only had one bad experience where my return was never received and e-mails on the matter were never answered, simply because their returns policy isn't as forgiving as Amazon's. Didn't have a choice though, since the alternative was getting secondhand books whose conditions are self-declared by the sellers, and I hate it when the description doesn't match up to my admittedly exacting standards. I thought about getting everything through the American site, but after factoring in shipping costs and import duties, it just didn't make sense. Any money I was saving by buying from the USA would basically go towards paying the import duties! Pretty excited to have made the purchase though. It's been something I've wanted to do ever since I first read the original Circle trilogy years ago, and it's impossible to find his stuff in Singaporean bookstores, I think, or at least not the whole set of 16.