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What books are we reading now?

Just starting "The Foundation Trilogy" by Isaac Asimov. Will probably take me a few decades to finish it with the amounts of study material I *should* be reading instead :D

Oh, that is so cool, Chilli. :cool: And the series is really a quick read, no fooling.

I just finished "A Canticle for Leibowitz" and now must buy its sequel, "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman". I really enjoyed "Canticle" despite the use of Latin which I cannot understand at all. A very interesting portrait of a post-World War III world. I'd never have heard of it if it weren't for B5. :)

I just started "Solaris". I never quite saw the movie, but kept hearing how the book is much better. So... :D
 
Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Is that a translation of an English title? I'm not familiar with it, and I thought I'd gone through pretty much all of the Mars books as a boy. The closest thing I can come up with is Synthetic Men of Mars. There may have been some Tolkein-style posthumous anthologies and collections of unfinished and unpublished writings that were put together by the Burroughs estate that I'm not familiar with, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of an entire novel that I've never come across.

Regards,

Joe
 
I just finished reading "Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1921-1945," by Barbara Tuchman. If you want to read history, Tuchman's a good name to know. And General Joseph Stilwell is one of the more impressive American soldiers on record, as far as I'm concerned. He presided over a backwater theater of World War II so he doesn't get much press, but he deserves more accolades than he receives.
 
Temarie, by Naomi Norvak, great fun involving Dragons in the Napoleonic wars. Also finally finished Neil Stephenson's baroque cycle. Superb books...
 
Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Is that a translation of an English title? I'm not familiar with it, and I thought I'd gone through pretty much all of the Mars books as a boy. The closest thing I can come up with is Synthetic Men of Mars. There may have been some Tolkein-style posthumous anthologies and collections of unfinished and unpublished writings that were put together by the Burroughs estate that I'm not familiar with, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of an entire novel that I've never come across.

Regards,

Joe

It's a hardcover set of 3 stories..

A Fighting Man of Mars
Swords of Mars
Synthetic Men of Mars

:)
 
It's a hardcover set of 3 stories...

Ah, an omnibus edition of three separate novels. The publisher must have given it the title. That explains everything. Dover used to offer trade paperbacks with two or three of the Mars books together (and with illustrations by Frank Frazetta) but I don't think they ever gave the volumes their own titles. The spine would just read, A Fighting Man of Mars and Thuvia: Maid of Mars or whatever the books were that were included.

As I recall, Swords was rather subpar Burroughs, but Synthetic Men had some of the most interesting ideas in the whole series, as well as an engaging hero in the Earthman Ulysses Paxton. Fighting Man is such a generic title I can't connect it to a particular character of story, although I'm sure I must have read it. I assume you've read the original trilogy of A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars?

Regards,

Joe
 
It's been a long time since I read Burroughs. I did read some of the Mars stuff, but I remember Tarzan the Terrible as being the best of him I ever read. It had it all, prehistoric animals, several species of ape men, interspecies sex, Nazis, human sacrifice to produce immortality potions, lots of suspense... now that they have the technical capability, I think a well-made movie of this book would be the most amazing thing, better than King Kong, Jurassic park, Indiana Jones, etc...
 
I did read some of the Mars stuff, but I remember Tarzan the Terrible as being the best of him I ever read.

Ah, so long since I've read the Tarzan books I'm not sure I can place that one, either. :) (I'm going to have to go to the library and pick some of these up, because I doubt I still have any of the moldy paperbacks lying around here amid the thousands of volumes in bookcases, on closet shelves and stacked up on every horizontal not devoted to something else. :))

Tarzan at the Earth's Core was definitely fun, if you haven't read that one. A rare cross-over between Burrough's series, it combines his prehistoric inner world of Pelucidar and with the Ape Man and would also make a really terrific movie. For that matter, so would the original Tarzan of the Apes, which has never had a proper film adaptation.

I think both the novel and the character would be better thought of today if Burroughs had stopped with the first book and if there had never been any films. And Burroughs was, in may ways, a better writer than he gets credit for. His real problem is that he became enormously successful at the lowest end of the writing business - the penny-a-word world of the pulps - where he could sell consistently and keep his familiy in food and clothing, but only by churning out a huge volume of work. If he been in a position to write and rewrite and polish and get published between hard covers, his sheer talent as a story-teller and the energy he poured into his work might (with a good editor) have become a respectable popular novelist in the mold of Robert Louis Stevenson.

I forgot who it was who wrote the comparison, but someone charted Burrough's growth as a wiriter by comparing the opening lines of the first story he sold (A Princess of Mars, which launched one successful series) and the second (Tarzan of the Apes, the greatest literary franchise in between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.)

Princess is the first-person narrative of John Carter, but it opens with an "editor's note" that explains how the story came to be written and published. (A literary device similar to Dr. Watson publishing the cases of Sherlock Holmes. Burroughs originally published the story under a pseudonym, Norman Bean [a play on "Normal Bean" - "Not Crazy".] But the editor's note is signed "Edgar Rice Burroughs", who is presented as the nephew of John Carter, and was therefore seen by the original readers as just another fictional character.)

This is the opening of that note:

"To the reader of this work: In submitting Captain Carter's manuscript to the world, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be in order."

Boring, right?

Here's the opening of Tarzan:

"I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other"

Now that's a hook.

Burroughs learned the difference between the first and the second in the space of less than a year, and the magazine the carried Tarzan sold many times the number of copies as Princess. BTW, the actual opening line of Carter's first person narrative is much better than Burrough's editor's note:

"I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood"

Regards,

Joe
 
It has been decades since I read Tarzan, but I read many of them. I think that Burroughs was sort of a Joseph Conrad. I loved the way he had several plot lines going at once. You knew they were going to collide, but were never sure where, or when. Pelucidar is in Tarzan the Terrible, but I don't recall Tarz as having to go to the Earth's core to reach it. Perhaps I've just forgotten. I do recall that the book was about twice as long as the other Tarzans I read, and was out of print in the mid 60's, so I had to get an old copy at a library, instead of buying the paperback, as I did with the others. Somebody should send a copy to Peter Jackson. :eek: :D

WHOOPS! My memory failed me, Tarzan the Terrible takes place in the prehistoric land of Pal-u-don, not Pelucidar. I found a summary:
http://www.erblist.com/erblist/tzterriblesum.html
 
I assume you've read the original trilogy of A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars

Yes, Joe, I did, and I LOVED it! John Carter was awesome! :LOL:
 
Although I don't know if I plan on finishing it now, since the reason I had for reading it is over now (Western Civ II book review thinger), I'm still technically in the middle of The Communist Manifesto. I'm also in the midst of reading Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis, Cabal by Clive Barker, and re-reading The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove.
 
I just got done reading "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown (yes, the Da Vinci Code guy). Its the first of his books that I have read, and I have to be honest: Not Impressed.

It is sort of a techno-thriller, involving the NSA, code breaking, and a super-unbreakable code and how it will effect the intelligence gathering world. Seemed like a good premise. Maybe I just got lucky on this one, but I figured out what was really going on about halfway through the book. It just seemed kind of obvious. What's worse is when the story was coming to a climax and the heroes were trying to save the day by deciphering one final code...that whole part went on for like 20 pages. The code/riddle they were trying to figure out was so damn easy (the wrote it like these genious characters were morons and didn't read the entire message) that I found myself skipping ahead until when they actually figured it out and entered the sucker.

I guess on a couple counts it was just really predictable to me. I'm going to try Angles and Demons still though, because I have heard that is a good one, and more of a traditional mystery.
 
There was some talk in 2004 about the guy who did Sky Captain doing an adaptation of A Princess of Mars as the first of a projected film series, but I haven't heard anything since. (There have been a number of attempt to bring the series to the big screen, including one by Warner Bros. greatest animators - and the creator of Beanie and Cecil - Bob Clampett. )

Until very recently cel animation would really have been the only way to bring Burroughs's Mars to life. Even Ray Harryhausen at his stop-motion best could never have made Tars Tarkas a real character in the same way modern CGI could make Gollum or the modern Kong a character. (Although his mentor, Willis O'Brien, came close with the original Kong.) I've seen some of the sketches for the Clampett/Burroughs collaboration, but until I found the article I linked to above I didn't know that any of the complete tests had survived, much less that they were available on DVD. (Heck, I didn't even know Beanie and Ceceil was out, or I probably would have bought it. :))

I'd love to see Jackson or some other modern film maker who understands how to use FX to serve the story tackle the Mars books - and Tarzan for that matter. (Although in the case of Tarazn I'd just as soon see it left at two or three films and end with his marriage to Jane, rather than go on forever.)

Regards,

Joe
 
I just got done reading "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown (yes, the Da Vinci Code guy). Its the first of his books that I have read, and I have to be honest: Not Impressed.

My future Mother-in-law bought me Deception Point by Dan Brown, because it was about NASA and she knew I was into space-related things. While I certainly appreciated the thought, I thought that the book was terrible. The story itself was OK-ish, but Dan Brown's writing style is, well, rubbish in my opinon. My fiancee pointed out that he was probably aiming for the housewife market that want to feel like they are reading something intelligent.
 
Yeah. I read/skimmed Brown's "Angels and Demons," a prequel to "the Da Vinci Code," and it was just miserable.
 
Brown is a semi-literate hack who lifted the central idea for the book from some other semi-literate hacks and a few wacko French anti-semites and Catholic bashers (who forged all the "Priory of Sion" crap in the 1950s and smuggled it into various archives) and got lucky because the subject suited the zietgeist at a particular moment. It was a triumph of timing over talent, much like The China Syndrome, a mediocre film that benefited from the coincidence that it opened only days before the nuclear scare at Three Mile Island.

Regards,

Joe
 
I just finished "American Science Fiction TV" by Jan Johnson-Smith. It's a interesting little read, almost entirely analysis. The subtitle is "Star Trek, Stargate, and Beyond," and out of necessity it focuses on Rodenberry's greatest offspring, but the author reserves the greatest praise -- and the last chapter of the book -- for Babylon 5. A few minor errors here and there, but nothing egregious, and some useful insights now and then. The most intriguing parts of the book for me were the ones on Space: Above and Beyond and Farscape, neither of which I have seen, but the book got me to watch some B5 eps today (as well as a few ST:TNG eps that were on as well).
 
Concurrently started Pandora Star by Peter Hamilton, (great so far) and the 'Complete Chornicles of Conan'. By Robert E Howard, as this was really one of the works that kick started the whole swords and socrery thing.

I've never read any, and am quite enjoying it so far. He obivously shared a lot with lovecraft. The writing is nicely over the top, but the overall tone is wonderfully dark and makes a great change from some twee modern fantasy...

For books written in the 30's, they are also pleasingly bloodthirsty and wonderfully sexist... :p
 
I've just finished reading Yes Man by Danny Wallace, where the author lives his life for a few months saying yes to everything he is asked and sees where it takes him.

The situations he found himself in were funny (due in large part to spam e-mail) and also had a positive message about life in general. The book seemed a bit too "polished" to be real-life but the author explains at the beginning that everything in the book happened to him, but he re-arranged some events to get a better narrative.
 

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