I think Rice peaked with The Vampire Lestat. The first part, Downtown Saturday Night in the Late Twentieth Century, in particular excels both in its ideas and its prose. We see Lestat, who went into torpor in the 1930s, rising to discover the world of the 1980s. He loves it, for reasons that tie back to his mortal life and early vampiric existence, with a very palpable sense of wonder. And it’s punctuated by moments of character humor that are genuinely funny, too. The rest of the book is very good with moments of excellence, too. She never hit those heights consistently again.

I've actually read a fair bit of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, The Stoics. A lot of it is actually pretty useful. Marcus Aurellius's Meditations helped me with my anxiety. I mean I was better after just reading it. Aristotle's Ethics and Poetics are great. Really anyone interested in the art of fiction should read the later. There is a lot crap in philosophy, but it tends to be the more modern stuff. While we have advance greatly technologically, I think we have degenerated philosophically.

A terrific beginning to Rocket Summer, Michael!👩‍🚀

I ended up getting an "Illuminated" Beehive version of Voyage to Arcturus myself. Couldn't resist. It's beautiful. The novel is one of those books you need to read for a while, then close and think about, and the design of this edition almost makes it feel like a book of wisdom from another planet. Anyone reading this for the bookclub should put their interpretations in the discord thread. Maybe that'll help us wrap our heads around it!

It seems like I recall C.S. Lewis mentioning that he read Voyage to Arcturus. Or am I just making things up? Ha ha. I might try it just for that reason. He's a favorite..

The Land that Time Forgot is on my pile, I need to get to it.

That Thor cover looked like Thor was doing a black metal musician pose. Just xerox the image to black and white, photoshop some corpsepaint and nailed wristbands onto him, darken that blond mane to black, and there you'd have it...

“So there’s this really weird part….” Now I have to find out what it is!

I've been doing a deep dive into Anne Rice's works this year and I've been having a wonderful time! When I was younger, I didn't really appreciate her way with words. But I am really enjoying her work now. I like the way she is constantly revealing new things in her mythos. As soon as you think you have all of her mythology figured out, she reveals new facts and characters that change everything you have read before. For instance, when you read Vampire Lestat and compare the story with Interview with the Vampire. Louis comes across as a tragic hero in his own book. But in Lestat's books, he's just kind of this depressive goth guy that likes to make himself a hero and Lestat and epic villain. The funny part being that Lestat doesn't really see himself as either one. He's more of a bon vivant who just takes what he can out of life...the bad and the good. I tend to believe his stories more because it's easy to catch Louis' lies. He tries to portray Lestat as a dimwit who has no idea how to manage money. Just reading Lestat's accounts it's easy to see he's NOT dim. And he's got more money than Louis could imagine. It's also funny to see how Louis is constantly berating Lestat for creating Claudia, the child vampire. When Louis himself hangs out with Armand, who Lestat reveals is also a child vampire. A fact Louis conveniently leaves out of his own chronicle. I enjoyed Queen of the Damned. That first trilogy feels like a trilogy. Admittedly Queen of the Damned goes off on a lot of tangents. But I was still riveted. Tale of the Body Thief was ok. I won't knock it. And it's obvious Lestat likes some of the same old authors we do. But it was kind of low stakes, I guess you would say, compared to what we just finished in Queen of the Damned. I just finished the Witching Hour trilogy by Anne and it's...Definitely something! The first book is biblically long! It's almost three books in one. Very interesting, though. A creepy history that plays out through character interaction and journals held by the Talamasca, the organization that observes supernatural beings in the Vampire Chronicles. The second book was good, but I felt kind of let down by the end. I was probably expecting too much. I tend to love middle books in series and it was just kind of ok. The third book goes off on a complete tangent but takes us into a whole other section of the Anne Rice universe! Some of the new characters are fun and the history revealed is just as engrossing as what we see in the Vampire Chronicles. One thing I'll say: White Wolf Publishing, the folks who did Vampire: The Masquerade and Changeling: The Dreaming, should have been paying Anne royalties! They borrowed a LOT from her for their roleplaying game. The last Thor collection you read is pretty much where I left off with Thor. I was a huge collector and I enjoyed Tom Defalco's run. He was a very good writer, if one of the worst editor-in-chiefs. But when he left, it left Thor in a bad spot. Tom left it in a good place, but Starlin and co....Wow, they just didn't get it. There have been some ok Thor runs since, but I don't think it's ever reached the level it was when Tom left.

I read quite a bit of the Dynamite Comics Humb!e Bundle from a few weeks back over the weekend. Also, the first of the Black Chamber trilogy from SM Stirling. The man knows how to write but rarely keeps his titallations to himself. It postulates a world where TR Roosevelt is president during WW1 and technology races ahead of our timeline.

A Voyage to Arcturus reminds me of Robert Silverberg's Son of Man...especially since I wound up throwing both books across the room midway through..

Hey I love that Thor cover

1924!??? That's almost a hundred years ago!! I thought I had a real nice copy of The Land That Time Forgot.....but, upon checking, my nice copy is actually The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

_A Voyage to Arcturus_ is indeed very strange, about a sort of evolutionary struggle of different life philosophies, rendered in biological form. But it also felt to me a bit like a parable of a mystical journey, each stage of Maskull's journey a step in an ongoing progress towards a sort of enlightenment. There's a modern book, _A Red Sun Also Rises,_ by Mark Hodder, which is a tribute to old style planetary romances, but which I think also has something of a similar air to _Voyage,_ though it is frankly much more enjoyable. It's about a Victorian missionary who, after a grim period in a south sea island gets mysteriously transported to an alien planet where a bizarre race of aliens seem determined to remodel their civilization on the example of the newcomer. It is as wild and strange and funny as the Burton and Swinbourne mysteries that he also wrote.

I can see the influence of Arcturus on Robert Silverberg's Son of Man. It's also very weird.

I've almost finished The Coming Race, I like story of discovering a lost humanoid species within the earth, their strange society and technology (cool automata), boy does it drag in places where in delves into the minutia of almost everything, kills the pacing and the plot. I like the story just not how its written. Poe's seemingly endless paragraphs discussing fauna and the finer details of balloon aeoronautica, are vibrant and lively in comparrison. Next week the Best of CL Moore, excited just thinking about it.

Time for a little humble pie for me: I sometimes complain about modern book series that people like to collect, and I feel like they charge too much or they're manipulating their buying base, and then, there is the classic science fiction series by Bison Press. Almost all the books are in public domain yet they charge academic publishing prices, sometimes for a photo reprint! And yet still, I love their weird typeface, matching black livery, and engaging old fashioned cover art. The only thing that has stopped a buying spree has been them changing up the covers recently. So I stand with you MKV for the ERB you held up.

Great to see you back 🎉

Can't believe I've got to my 50's and never read 'The Land That Time Forgot' trilogy....finally bought a hardback copy a few months ago and was gonna save it until I'd read a hundred or so other books that I own and haven't read yet (I really need to do my own book challenge), but after your review It is next on my list after my latest book, James Herbert (have you read any of his)?.......Britain's answer to King.

😎♥️👍🏻

You should make a video covering the 1st year of Titan's run on Conan. I think they've done a great job.

Y know it was the 90s.😂😂😂

Oj tak ERB ta trylogia jest swietna zresztą wszystko co napisał jest cudowne zwlaszcza cykl Tarzan i Barsooom dodam jeszcze Venus i Pellucidar Pozdrawiam z polski fan ERB dziadek Regi 👍👋👋👋🥸

Is the book as good as the movie? 🎥

Love your coverage of Thor. When you finish the series, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the original run of Spidey or the X-Men (if you have those Epic Collections, of course).

Philosophy is boring, Michael. Our opinions are in agreement.

You should do a top ten list of books you would have bought if you could buy books?

The original trilogy is the best, with Queen of the Damned being the weakest. I thought it kind of went downhill after that. To the point where I never even bothered with the later ones. She returned to it after she turned away from the church again, so I am curious about how those last few turned out.

Michael, have you ever read carrion comfort?

Wouldn't that "planet" that revolves around Arcturus be a "moon"? What is wrong with them, messing with Thor?

“Illustrated by Jim Woodring” - wtf? Woodring is one of the best cartoonists ever and you didn’t show none of those illustrations?? 😡