I’ve always loved the Asterix books, but I’ve recently rekindled that love, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. My son has just started reading them all (a day that I was looking forward to for a while) and he’s already read eight books in about two weeks.
I’ve never really known how popular Asterix is around the world. I don’t even think everyone I know in the UK knows much about it, so it almost feels a little bit niche and I kind of like it that way to be honest. It’s of French origin and I’m not sure that it really became big in the US, but in the UK it’s reasonably well known. Back in the day I think I only owned about 3 of the books, and I probably read about 3 or 4 others from the library. But I never actually read any others. I just read my three books over and over and over again. And I loved them. So I can’t wait to go through and read all the books from the start. I’ve been slowly collecting them all over the last few years. I’ve obviously got a spreadsheet about it, and I now own all the ones that were done by both Goscinny and Uderzo, and all the ones that were done by Uderzo after Goscinny died, but I don’t have all of the newer ones that were done by new people after Uderzo retired yet. I do plan to get them though. I’m hoping to read, review and rank the full collection of books.
I also have several other different Asterix books and toys. I will do some reviews of those too. Here are a selection of them.
There are a few Asterix movies. I might watch them all. We’ll see. I don’t think they’re all very good, but this Blu-ray here is fantastic.
And there are several Asterix video games. I will definitely play all of them and review them.
Last year I went to an exhibition about René Goscinny which had some fascinating history about Goscinny’s life and how the Asterix books started, and it was fantastic to see some Uderzo artwork in the flesh. That’s probably where my passion for Asterix came back. Long may it continue, by Toutatis!
Stay tuned for more Asterix posts very soon.