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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Actually I would say that is somewhat unfair to Asimov. Pretty much every writer who publishes fairly often, writes to make money (There are some exceptions like J.D. Salinger).
Of course, I may not be completely objective when it comes to Asimov. He was my favorite author in my early teen years. I remember in the last one or two summers before I had to get a job, spending hours sitting on a chair in the back yard reading Foundation, or the Complete Robot....
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Bill
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I never said he was unique in that respect
. But it's simple fact that if somebody publishes enough stuff to to be included in 9 out 10 categories for the Dewey Decimal system, that not all of it is going to be gold. Even narrowing it down to the Foundation/Robot universe covers a heckuva lot of printed material. The problem with recommending to a newbie that they read things in a somewhat arbitrary order is that the first book in that order may not be a particularly good one. It's first "just because", not because it's best. And since so many of them are more or less self-contained, why not read a really, really GOOD one?
Unfortunately I haven't read a lot of Asimov since high school--and yes, he was one of my favorite authors, too! So I can't recall a lot of specifics about which of the Foundation/Robot series specifically to recommend.
Too bad "Nightfall and other Stories" doesn't seem to be available as an ebook. There's a good cross-section of Asimov for you right there. I'll take "It's Such a Beautiful Day" or "Breeds there a Man" over probably half of the Robot shorts. But there's clunkers in that collection, too (at least to me, YMMV).