I have been reading again lately. It is a change for the better. We wade through the weird information that seems to be important at the moment- Tiger’s libido, the change in nuclear policy, you know.
 
Like you, I spend too much time most days peering into the computer screen, one way or another, and get alerts from my friends at the Times and a professional network that mines the world for strange stuff. I find that over time the machine is transforming my brain, forcing it into a mode that accepts only chunk-sized bits of information like a standard e-mail.
 
Printing an attachment is the equivalent of an “action complete,” even if I never actually get around to walking down the hall to take it off the printer.
 
A friend of mine is still a voracious reader and passes along recommendations periodically. It is as close to a book club as I am likely to get these days.
 
Recent selections include the Swedish detective trilogy by Stieg Larsson; which was the topic of a feature story on NPR. Apparently no one in the dying publishing industry thought that the dense prose would be a hit, so the last of three volumes was not scheduled for release in the States until next month, though it has been available in the UK for several weeks.
 
I really like the kick-ass female lead, the tattooed Lisbeth Salander, and have been eager to find out what happened to her after the big cliff-hanger that ended the second volume, so I cancelled my order with Amazon-US and ordered from Amazon-UK and it should be here next week.
 
Others in the stack by the brown chair include “Champlain’s Dream” by David Hackett Fischer, “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett, and “The Fall of Berlin,” by Antony Beevor. The latter is because I think I am going to actually be in that city next month, and want to get myself contextualized to what happened to transform a great city into piles of disassociated brick and lumps of stone.
 
I am sort of out of current time, as well. My pal mentioned that a Golden Oldie worth a peek was “The Doomed Oasis” by Hammond Innes, which popped out in 1960. I had to reach back in my memory to remember the generator of those historic thrillers. It is set in Oman, a place I knew briefly a long time ago. Air Vice-Marshall Bennett was the ring-leader of an ex-pat air force for the Sultan at the time, so the Raj was not quite dead.
 
That got me thinking about old books. When I started devouring paperbacks in the early 1960s- when Hammond Innes was in his prime, the publishers were busy recycling all sorts of vintage material. I liked the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan. I was stunned when my Mom mentioned that she had read them all as a girl.
 
We remember the Tarzan books through the movies, of course. Barsoom was the made-up name for Mars, and Burroughs had transferred a Virginian named John Carter there in the first volume, written in 1912.
 
If you can get past the impossible scene setter- Carter served in the Civil War as a Confederate and is eternally in his mid-thirties- it is great fun. Burroughs mined the material for a long time- after “A Princess of Mars” was collected out of the serialized pulps in 1917, Carter reappeared in “The Gods of Mars” (1918) and eventually in eleven others, concluding with “Llana of Gathol” in 1948.
 
Carter stands 6′2″ tall and has close-cropped black hair and steel-gray eyes. He was a kick-ass hero with antebellum charm. Apparently they are making a movie dredged from the mythos of Barsoom, which will probably be in 3-D.
 
I am not going back to Carter’s sleeping-silks-and-furs, since the sentiment is thoroughly ancient. I will always remember the characters fondly, though. I was sort of amazed to stumble across one of the stranger knock-offs of the franchise the other day though.
 
I am in between real books at the moment. While waiting for the third Stieg Larsson book, I picked up a 40th anniversary copy of “The Tarnsman of Gor,” by John Norman.
 
It is essentially the same story that Burroughs told, only not written in as much detail, but including a lot more bondage imagery. The cover of he anniversary shows a slave girl’s torso, her wrists bound together and strategically placed in front of her shapely and quite nude hips.
 
The protagonist is a fellow named Tarl Cabot, who has a really cool destiny as a citizen of a counter-earth, and like I said, the planet Gor is just another discount Barsoom. John Norman churned out 26 volumes of the Gorean saga, and they got more and more stylized as they went along. A whole cult grew up around them, and the content migrated to the original web and formed the basis of an sort of S&M dungeon school of literature.
 
The first one was good, and it was interesting to see how the genre deveoped, out of Tarzan and into body piercing and ritual tattoos.
 
I don’t think I have time for the rest, but it is amazing that 40 years can go by as swiftly as it does. I will need to get to some higher-brow stuff to challenge the mind, but it was exactly the perfect book to pass the time until the Duke Blue Devils dispatched doughty Butler in the NCAA men’s finals, and the Monday could finally be put to bed, along with a weary watcher.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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