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So What Are you Reading?: Generations

But I was rereading some of Robert E. Howard's original "Conan" stories just a few months ago.

I also read a few of the Howard stories this year, along with a whole bunch of the 80s pastiches.

My first encounter with REH was around 1978, when I picked up a used copy of The Hour of the Dragon. It was a good time to discover Conan. At the time, there were three Berkley books of unedited Howard Conan stories and twelve volumes of Conan from L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, with occasionally edited Howard Conan stories, Howard stories about other characters rewritten to become Conan stories, and brand new Conan stories by de Camp and/or Carter. One thing de Camp and Carter got right was keeping most of the focus on short stories rather than novels. And then of course there were the Marvel comics. And by 1979 or so Ace put out a couple more novels and then Bantam did a run of six books, and then around 1982 Tor took over. I gave up maybe a dozen books into the Tor run. Got back in when Del Rey did its three volumes of pure REH Conan, and I've read one or two of the new Titan line of novels. Some of Tor's writers, like Robert Jordan, proved it's way too easy to fall into a formula writing Conan, but the new writers seem a bit more interesting.

The guy who really got me interested in Conan was the owner of the comic store I managed. Unfortunately, he took his own life in the beginning of September. I really wish he was around to talk about that Conan #25 with. He would have really loved it.

My condolences for your loss.
 
I'm finishing up Star Wars: The High Republic Phase III with some of the novels and comics I have yet to get to. There are some great bits and characters in this project, but I don't think Marchion Ro and his group were interesting enough to warrant this many titles that deal with defeating him. I hope that Trials of the Jedi puts an end to his villainy one way or the other.

In the world of Trek, I am just starting Lost to Eternity. I'm a big fan of STIV and Gillian, so my hopes are high.
 
There are edited versions of the Conan stories? Does anyone know if the editions that look like this are edited or unedited?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6606301-the-coming-of-conan-the-cimmerian

That's one of the Del Rey editions. Those are the good ones. Not only do they stay close to Howard's originals, they sometimes include earlier drafts as bonus features. The de Camp and Carter books reportedly revised Howard's stories to make them better fit the chronology of Conan's life they were building through their series of books. The Del Rey series also has good collections of Howard's Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn stories, as well as collections of some of his less well known characters. Bear in mind that these are not the most enlightened books about sex and race you're likely to read. But neither are Ian Fleming's James Bond books, which were written two or three decades later.
 
I'm now down to the epilogue of John Williams: A Composer's Life. The last subdivision of the last chapter was pretty much a statement of the same conclusion I'd drawn before Greiving had even begun to write this opus: Williams began his film scoring career at a time when the worst thing a critic could say about a serious concert piece would be to call it "film music," at a time when anything written since the 1930s that was even remotely accessible to the general public was loudly disparaged as hack, and at a time when filmmakers had all but abandoned anything resembling what Korngold, Rozsa, Herrmann, and so forth had been doing. And by calmly scoring films with music that was both artistically valid and completely accessible, as well as being in whatever idiom and genre is best suited to the subject matter, and doing the best work he knows how to do, with profound humility and modesty, he has managed to either convert or outlive the overwhelming majority of his critics, and to pave the way for Goldsmith, Horner, and a good many of the people scoring films today.
 
and to pave the way for Goldsmith, Horner, and a good many of the people scoring films today.

A bit of an overstatement, given that Goldsmith's feature film debut was a year before Williams's, and they were about equally prolific in film and TV scoring from the late 1950s onward, though Goldsmith probably had the edge.
 
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