It has been 23 years now since Isaac Asimov passed and he is perhaps the only person outside of direct family and friends whose passing I truly mourned.
I distinctly remember poring over the newspaper on 07 April 1992 reading about the fact that Isaac Asimov had passed away the day before, in New York city. The cause of his death was first a mystery and then revealed to be a quirk of chance. He died of HIV contracted from a blood transfusion of infected blood that he obtained after his heart bypass surgery in 1983.
I had then recently chanced upon the Foundation Trilogy by the great master and then started to read everything he had written that I could get my hands on. His science fiction and his non-fiction science books are equally enthralling.
I thought I had read a lot of Asimov, until I found out I was not even close. He is the only author to have published in all 10 sections of the Dewey system. He has written or edited more than 500 books and 9000 articles on subjects and topics as diverse as Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, Shakespeare, the Bible in non fiction and a number of genres in fiction including fantasy, mysteries, psychology and of course science-fiction.
The next time you are yearning for a good book, pick up an Asimov. If you are a science fiction fan, I strongly recommend 'Foundation'. If mysteries are your thing, pick up Isaac Asimov's Mysteries or the Black Widower Mystery Stories collection. Or, if you are not sure what you are in the mood for, you could choose any number in the Dewey Decimal System below and then look up Asimov.
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