Shortly before my fifteenth birthday, on a typical Saturday afternoon excursion to the (now defunct) WordsWorth bookstore in Harvard Square, I discovered a novel that, basically, permanently recalibrated my reading tastes: Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds. The time would come when I'd recognize the frenetic blend of comedy, fantasy, and action in Hong Kong's epic martial arts cinema, but in 1985 the adventures of Li Kao the sage and his peasant sidekick, Number Ten Ox, were like nothing I'd read before, and I was hooked. (The following summer, Big Trouble in Little China came out, and I'm pretty sure that it was reading Hughart that prepared me to love that film right away.)

You can actually find Bridge of Birds kicking around if you look hard enough, and I highly recommend you do, but turning up the two sequels gets a little trickier—apparently Eight Skilled Gentlemen was published so haphazardly hardly anyone, including me, could find it when it came out—but, thanks to the prodding of John Scalzi (yes, him again), Subterranean Press is producing a limited-edition omnibus of all three novels. It's not even St. Patrick's Day yet, and already I know what I want for Christmas.