Wow, I really hit a block with the 50 books blog for the first time in years! The obvious cause is a recent head-first plunge into the world of tabletop role-playing games, but I wonder if there is a deeper fatigue at play that has allowed/enabled me to avoid writing book reviews for almost two months.
Very briefly, I played RPGs back in the 80s when D&D first exploded and then stopped with adolescence and other social pursuits. I got pulled back in in the late '90s and then got deep into it (online fights and everything) in the early aughts and then dropped out again with the birth of my own child.
During the pandemic, my friend groups and I were having regular zoom calls and decided to start a 5e game online. We have been playing sporadically but consistently since then. Something happened a few months ago where I got sucked way back in and am now demonstrating all the classic behaviours of the true addict (online talking about it way too much, buying all kinds of beautiful books, playing in a second group locally and in one shots online; it's bad!).
So to slowly drag this back to actual reading, I've been spending most of my reading time, reading game books, which you don't usually read linearly (they have rules, settings, etc. it would be kind of like reading an encyclopedia straight through). I did actually read one from beginning to end and I will count that in this blog, but overall my reading has fallen way off.
Before the sickness truly set in, I did read this second Tarzan. Somebody somewhere recommended this one and The Jungle Tales of Tarzan as particularly good and I found both of them in Vancouver. I did enjoy The Return of Tarzan overall, but had mixed feelings. First of all, with Burroughs, one has to account for the racism and eugenics. It's less present here just because the first half of the book takes place in Europe so less opportunity for him to describe the various disadvantages of the non-whites. But it goes hard in the second half. It's bad and I condemn it but I'm still going to read the books.
To me as a reader, the literary problem with Burroughs is that he has a lot of potential with the Tarzan concept and he just kind of barfs it all over the page. His miraculous education and rise to the role of gentlemen (due to his racial superiority of course which is intrinsically tied to class in Burrough's world) makes Tarzan a great vehicle for the contrast between the stiff laws of civilization and the powerful release of the savage. You need to build this up gradually, though, and use it sparingly at the right moments. Instead, Tarzan is just kicking the shit out of groups of people multiple times right away, while, super annoyingly, never actually killing the one serious bad guy. It's just so bald that Burroughs is keeping the Russian spy alive to maintain a central narrative, but he does it by violating the the rules of Tarzan's own character. It's bad.
On top of that, there are all these convoluted plot lines which ensure that Tarzan and Jane won't get together. They literally pass each other on separate ships in the night. I've avoided the plot this whole time. Basically, the first half is in Europe and involves said Russian spy doing bad shit to a rich guy. Then they all go to Africa and get shipwrecked and Tarzan comes to rescue them.
Before he can rescue them, though, we get the main plot of the second half which is Tarzan going back to the tribal village in his old stomping grounds and defending them against Arab slave raiders. Here the book gets really fun. It's almost Conan the Barbarian territory; real pulp stuff. He discovers an ancient city filled with gold and these weird pygmy descendants from space who were once purebred but got all corrupted with time or some shit. The hilarious part is their queen is still super hot and genetically pure and she saves Tarzan from being sacrificed because she is hot for him. It's quite wacky and super entertaining and with a bit of tweaking could be a cool origin story for the Kingdom of Wakanda.
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