As I might have alluded to yesterday, we went to Wisconsin for a week. We stopped in the Milwaukee area for a night and headed out to Wisconsin Dells for a couple of days. However, Monday found the children with too few books to read, so we headed out to the local used book stores for reinforcements. And by “local,” I mean twenty or so miles down the highway.
We stopped in Portage only to find the Good Times used book and record store there was only open on Friday and Saturday, so we headed down to Baraboo (aka Burriboo) to the Village Booksmith. It’s a neat little book store across from the town square.
I think the children might have gotten something, but I sure did.
I bought:
- Deadlands: Welcome to Hell, the first Role Playing Game (RPG) I’ve bought in maybe 20 years. It’s a futuristic addition to the original Deadlands: The Weird West RPG. It looks to be (upon further review) to be a post-apocalyptic setting with a really complicated combat system.
- A different translation of the Tao Te Ching than I just read, but it’s now mine. As I mentioned in the book report, I might already have a copy somewhere.
- A book of local history, A Man Called Baraboo.
- A book about Confucius (The Living Thoughts of Confucius) and a book of Mencius’ work because I’ve not seen anything in Confucuian thought at the library.
- Thundering Silence, a Buddhist sutra with commentary by Thich Naht Hanh (whose Peace of Mind I read last month).
- Time Slave, a book by John Norman, author of the Gor novels (some of which I’ve read). Judging by the Boris Vallejo cover, this book is completely different because its hero is not named Tarl.
Not pictured: Two LPs I bought from the couple boxes they have in the back: Angela Bofill’s Angel of the Night and Eydie Gorme’s Tonight I’ll Say a Prayer.
It wasn’t a trip to the book sale, though, so we spent a pretty penny here. The book prices are not crazy–not even as expensive as, say, Hooked on Books. It gives me some things to read in my recent Eastern religion/philosophy concentration and things to keep me busy for the free moments of the vacation (which means book reports are on my to-do list).
I remember reading Norman. A writer with all of the grace and poise of a tap-dancing nose tackle. Probably bought them for the covers.
Seems to me I’ve heard that before.
The author actually has a doctorate in philosophy (and was a philosophy professor), which explains why the first chapter of Time Slave is a brief treatise on epistemology. And not a whole lot of action or setup, although we have the big reveal at the end of the chapter–which the chapter obviously works to obscure–that the antagonist/main character is A GIRL!
Much like in the aforelinked Captive of Gor, I’m afraid. Which is why I have yet to get much further than the first chapter thus far.
It’s still true ;-)
Kathryn Trendacosta did a long interview with him that I read once from a link on his wikipedia page. You have to wonder what happened while he was writing the series; the first couple of books were pretty good Burroughs pastiches but then he got more and more into preaching his — ahem — different ideas. His style degraded, too. It’s been a million years, but if I’m recalling them right those first couple were about on a par with Lin Carter — nothing special about the writing, but nothing that got in the way of the story. After that, the style got more and more arch and the characterization creepier with every outing. If I hadn’t been prone to reading everything with a sword or a babe on the cover, I would have ditched them way earlier.
Did I ever tell you about how I learned about this series?
Back around the turn of the century, I used to do Ebay a bunch. I would go to garage sales and estate sales and buy books, CDs, and games and post them on Ebay. I cleared about 200 dollars a month on it plus whatever I bought for myself with the operating capital, which was a bunch.
Anyway, I hit this one garage sale on Reavis Barracks road where they had a bunch of the Gor paperbacks, first printings mostly, for fifty cents each, so I bought them and listed them. The first printings of the old books went for a pretty good price in those heady days of the seller’s market on Ebay. I know I got almost $100 for #22, Dancer of Gor. (When I say they were heady days, they were–you could easily make a profit like I was, but when the sellers moved in en masse, it became a buyer’s market, where books sell for a penny each and Dancer of Gor is $10).
At some point, I ended up with a couple of the reprints of the early books that I bought later to try to sell, but the market had turned, so I kept them for myself. And picked up a couple more to round out the first ten.
I agree they’re not high fantasy, but I read a lot worse, as you have probably seen.