Conan

This blog post is not really about Korea, but about a book I read before I came here: Conan.

The Mr.'s brother gave him three volumes of collections of Conan stories from a used book store. The mass market paperbacks don't seem to have been read before--they were in much better condition than the one in this photo--but the glue is disintegrating. The books smell like decaying plant matter, and every page we turn gently falls away from its spine.

Because they are deteriorating from age, these books are hard to read, but they are worth the effort. The Mr. and I took turns reading the Conan stories in this volume, known as Conan #1, aloud to each other as we drove through the depressingly dead strip-mined parts of Kentucky to my mother's house.

The author of the original Conan stories, Robert E. Howard, was a penpal of HP Lovecraft and a future suicide. He created Conan as his idealized alter ego. Conan did not understand civilization; in one story he gives up riches because they would weigh him down. He seeks some balance between stability--enough gold for wine and women--and adventure. He is a thief, a murderer, and Howard's ideal man. Maybe you've seen one of the movie adaptations. None of them are true to the stories.

The stories in this collection are escapist gems. Conan braves wolves, sorcery, and ancient gods to bring down great evil, steal a bunch of treasure, or both. The most grandly epic one, for me, was "The City of Skulls." Conan actually went to Tibet. Wrap your head around that one. The best stories, though, are the ones Howard completed in his own lifetime: "The Tower of the Elephant", "Rogues in the House", and "The God in the Bowl", which owes more to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' stories than any of the Weird Tales.The first tale though establishes who Conan is and makes him a far more complex character than the Schwarzenegger movies. Howard's Conan was no dumb beast of burden.

If you noticed from the last book I half-ass reviewed, I like short stories. They are less of a commitment than novels. I can finish one in an hour or two and actually have accomplished something. With novels, it's more like a long trudge than a walk around the block. Maybe I just like short stories because I'm lazy. Maybe I have OCD. At any rate, squirrel!