When I was a teenager in southern Oregon 1969 and into the early 1970s, it was easy to find cheap used paperback copies of sword-and-planet and sword-and-sorcery novels (and new copies, of course). The stuff was all over the place. As much as I liked Burroughs when I first began to read him in 9th grade (A Fighting Man of Mars) and similar stories of swordfights, escapes, perilous journeys beset by monsters, etc., having read a few thousand pages of such material, I began to find that it took an effort to push through such books to the end, if these sorts of things were all they had to offer. They'd become kind of tedious. The books accumulated while things I was more interested in were read, and reread. I've been recollecting that time and realizing how it came to be that I had a fair amount of such stuff that I never read. I don't believe I ever read ERB's five Venus books, or Howard's Almuric, or The Secret People by John Wyndham under a pseudonym, or Williams's Jongor of Lost Land, or Brett Sterling's Danger Planet, or Brackett's The Ginger Star -- all books I know I had or think I probably owned many years ago. Recently I tried to reread Burroughs' s The Gods of Mars, and, as with A Princess of Mars a few years ago, I found that it wasn't holding my interest -- so why persist? That's also happened with some rereadings of Robert E. Howard that I have tried in recent years.
I also recently tried to reread some of August Derleth's imitations of Lovecraft. They were unfinishable.
Yet really good things from even earlier days still please me. I'm now, once again, in the third of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books (The Castle of Llyr). Given the humanity of the characters and other elements, these books are actually, in some ways, more grown up than the pulp stuff. I've been finding the Prydain books to be even better than I remembered.
Going back even farther in my youthful reading -- all these years I saved some 1960s Gold Key reprints of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics by Carl Barks -- "Luck of the North," "Back to the Klondike," etc. I read those stories again, for the umpteenth time, recently, and they still give me a lot of pleasure, not entirely explained simply by affection for them as things I have always liked.
