I've been thinking ...

[ericcoleman]

Yeah I know ... not again ...

I need to get some of my Edgar Rice Burroughs books out of storage, I feel the urge to read some of them again.

What is your favorite character, book, series, whatever?

My favorites are the Venus books, mostly because, while brilliant, Carson Napier is a bit of a goof, and messes up an awful lot, making him a little more real than the perfect folk who tend to populate ERB's work.

Comments

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

They are what they are, aren't they? Nobody reads them as Great Literature but sometimes you need some escapism. Now as much as ever.

My childhood home seems to have been near his childhood home in the San Fernando Valley, but by my time, the hillside where he roamed and imagined alien worlds had already been bought up by a private school. Still, I like to think that some "imagination vibes" were in the area and infected me as a tot.

Yes, I have ERB's complete works. In a box, in storage. Time to rotate the books, methinks.

One of my sillier efforts was to take the "alien" words as I found them, and spell them backwards to see if that's how he came up with them. The only one that "popped" was Amiocap, the land of the chronically depressed people in Pellucidar I think, which was Pacoima spelled backwards. If I lived in Pacoima, I would be depressed too probably.

[ericcoleman]

There are a couple of really good books in there ... but you have to look pretty deeply. I'd say the Mucker books, from what I remember, are actually pretty thoughtful, but mostly, his stuff was pretty silly, and I would imagine he would have been the first to say so.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

It's a 4-way tie between Alice In Wonderland, Hitchhiker's Guide, Dirk Gently and Harry Potter.

[ericcoleman]

I was unaware that Edgar wrote those ...

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

What is your favorite character, book, series, whatever?

I was unaware you were asking specifically about Edgar.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

I liked the Venus books myself. Never got into the Mars series for some reason. The whole "code of honor" they had on Mars struck me as irredeemably silly...look, if someone's coming at me with a sword, and all I've got is a radium pistol, I'm going to center-plug the son-of-a-bee, and the Devil take the rules that say I have to stand there and let him cut me down!

Did you ever read the "Harold Shea" story where Harold Shea goes to Burroughs' Mars? I'd love to know how De Camp got permission to do that.