I like compendiums. I feel so much safer knowing every single important X is in some book on my shelf, even if I am not really all that interested in individual X’s or X as a class. Right now I really want Sir Francis Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. One of those old books that came into its own during that last resurgence of interest in all things folksy. I’m not really into the Frodo Lives! scene, but I have always known that even bastardized mythology is Mythology, and terribly important somehow.