As I mentioned, we headed up to ABC Books to stock up on gift cards for Christmas today, and since it was for Christmas gifts, I found myself in the spirit to buy a bunch of random things for myself.
I got:
- Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’ve been reading them this year (most recently Little House on the Prairie, but I’m missing some in the series. Unfortunately, although I made a list of the missing volumes for my boys to look for at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this fall, I don’t know which ones I’m missing, so I only bought this one even though ABC Books has a bunch of the other titles available. I did not buy a complete series box set for $63 because I was being frugal, which in my mind is just not being as profligate as I possibly can.
- The Quest of Kadji by Lin Carter because I recognize the name from the old time pulp authors, but I don’t remember reading anything by him.
- The Foundation for Exploration by Sean Goonan. It looks like a self-published primer on philosophy.
- The Dark Side by William Schilcter, the second book in the series that started with Enter the Sandmen. I said in the review of the book that I’d probably pick it up sometime but wouldn’t order it online. Promise: KEPT!
- Bitter Harvest, a poetry chapbook from 1984 by Hazel Hirst.
- How to Play Guitar by Roger Evans. Perhaps buying books about playing guitar will help rekindle my drive to learn to play guitar. But the strategy has not worked so far.
- Henri Matisse, a monograph on his works that features the artist and a nude model on the back cover. So not only did I feel lascivious when I bought it, but I cannot read it at church and have to be very, very careful with it should I try to browse it during football games.
Total spent: A bunch, but most of it was on gift cards. So this hardly counts as me buying books for myself at all.
Carter worked in the same vein as ERB, in many cases to a degree of homage that rose to pastiche. He had a couple of planetary romance series (“Jandar of Callisto,” “Under the Green Star”), a hidden prehistoric-world-underground series (“Zanthodon”) and so forth. He and L. Sprague de Camp reworked some of Robert Howard’s Conan stories together in a chronological framework, adapting some other Howard manuscripts to insert the Cimmerian and in a couple of cases simply producing Conan stories out of whole cloth. He put together several other series in the same vein. I enjoyed Carter a lot as a kid but when I got older if I wanted to read some Burroughs or Howard I just reread the originals — Carter’s own work was a little too self-consciously aping his inspirations.
I also soured on Carter when he had the gall to call Terry Brooks “Sword of Shannara” “the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read” in reference to its derivation from “Lord of the Rings.” That may indeed be the case, but someone who could not have swiped more ERB if he’d stolen the man’s typewriter is not the guy to make it.
You know, I think of myself as a pretty good fan of the pulp, but I think that’s because I read some science fiction juvie titles in my middle school years but then switched over to suspense and mysteries in high school. So I don’t know too many of these titles or authors as well as I do Michael Shayne or Richard Prather.
I did read some of John Jakes’ Brak stories, though.