Chicken Soup for the Raging Barbarian’s Soul

Go to the bathroom of a non-geek, and you’ll probably find some fairly benign reading material — maybe a copy of Field and Stream, may be Real Simple, maybe the nearly-ubiquitous Chicken Soup for the [insert demographic here] Soul.

Not me. I’ve got The Bloody Crown of Conan, a collection of three Robert E. Howard novellas that I’m slowly dogearing my way through. I’m about 50 pages into the first story, “People of the Black Circle” and find that Howard’s fast-paced style and quickly moving scenes make the book very easy to quickly pick up and put back down again. In addition to Conan, I’ve got a stack of Make magazines on the bathroom bookshelf, which makes for some good geeky reading. Prior to their arrival, I’d kept a few comic collections, namely Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot.

What will replace Conan? I’m not sure. The voluminous Hard SF Renissance, which I’ve never managed to finish, may be next — a collection of short stories seems like it would work well.

%d bloggers like this: