I read this book in an enormous, one-volume, hardback edition, which is not something I'd really recommend. If I ever get the urge to read it again I'd try to hunt up these paperbacks.
Published as a series of novelettes (8) and one short novel (the last paperback). Fritz Leiber and H. Warner Munn both mentioned the impact of this series on them. Lots of talk though in most of the story with some short but great sequences of action. Someone needs to edit up a "good parts" version.
I read the first two and needed a break before going on. I agree with Morgan. Some scenes were engrossing, others were tough going. The style here is sometimes archaic. I prefer Munday's Jimgrim narration, which is conversational and still seems modern.
I picked up, in my second high-school library, a rebound edition of the same hardcover that James mentions, but the prose defeated me pretty quickly. (Much more interesting reading Leiber or Munn, or Dumas in translation.) But someone had read TROS complete enough to lead to it being rebound...perhaps twenty or more years before that turn of the 1980s moment...
I much have a later printing. The covers are more modern than these.
ReplyDeleteI have that edition of Tros, but don't have the others. Have you read these, Evan?
ReplyDeleteI read this book in an enormous, one-volume, hardback edition, which is not something I'd really recommend. If I ever get the urge to read it again I'd try to hunt up these paperbacks.
ReplyDeletePublished as a series of novelettes (8) and one short novel (the last paperback). Fritz Leiber and H. Warner Munn both mentioned the impact of this series on them. Lots of talk though in most of the story with some short but great sequences of action. Someone needs to edit up a "good parts" version.
ReplyDeleteI read the first two and needed a break before going on. I agree with Morgan. Some scenes were engrossing, others were tough going. The style here is sometimes archaic. I prefer Munday's Jimgrim narration, which is conversational and still seems modern.
ReplyDeleteTo my memory, the style is archaic all the time.
ReplyDeleteHe looks a lot like Steve Reeves in that first cover illustration.
ReplyDeleteI picked up, in my second high-school library, a rebound edition of the same hardcover that James mentions, but the prose defeated me pretty quickly. (Much more interesting reading Leiber or Munn, or Dumas in translation.) But someone had read TROS complete enough to lead to it being rebound...perhaps twenty or more years before that turn of the 1980s moment...
ReplyDeleteFor me, the first chapter was the hardest to get through. After that, the prose smoothed out a bit.
ReplyDelete