Finished Remembering Woolworth’s: A Nostalgic History of the World’s Most Famous Five-and-Dime , by Karen Plunkett-Powell, which was interesting.
Now I’m reading All Stirred Up: Suffrage Cookbooks, Food, and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote, by Laura Kumin.
New thread: 2022 is one third over!
I finished reading L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography, which was pretty good. Then I went on the internet to find out why people were upset with it. And some people are rabidly against it
But S.T. Joshi – probably the current expert on Lovecraft, and himself author of a biography of the man (which was lter expanded to a two-volume bio) has nothing bad to say about the book. Possibly because it’s what got him started on the road to Lovecraft scholarship. Neither does the Lovecraft wiki ( L. Sprague de Camp | The H.P. Lovecraft Wiki | Fandom )
I don’t think the charges of errors or of cherry-picking that some critics make against de Camp are appropriate, although I will admit that his repeated criticism of Lovecraft’s non-professionalism gets tired after a while. He does get almost all of his facts straight. And you really can’t help psychoanalyzing Lovecraft at least a little - it’d be really hard not to, in fact.
Having just read deCamp’s autobiography before this, and having heard him lecture, I can see why he wrote the biography this way. He really can’t help comparing other writers to himself – what other standard for comparison does he know so well? So when he criticizes Lovecraft for his heroes fainting like Victorian heroines, or Robert E. Howard’s misuse of historical models, or Edgar Rice Burroughs for his lack of consistency, de Camp invariably compares them to the way HE would have done it.
That’s probably not the best choice.
Because for all his knowledge and prose style, the raw fact is that I’d much rather read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter Martian stories rather than de Camp’s Krishna stories (his version of "Burroughs done right) or Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories rather than de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring (his first take on “Barbarian stories done right”) or any of de Camp’s own Conan the Barbarian stories. De Camp didn’t really “do” horror, but I’d rather read Lovecraft than the closest he swung to it, his “Novaria” stories, like The Emperor’s Fan.
de Camp’s own specialties – Time Travel like Lest Darkness Fall and The Glory that Was and the Harold She “Incompleat Enchanter” stories he wrote with Fletcher Pratt (drawing on mythologies and created worlds from all over), as well as de Camp’s own historical novels like The Bronze God of Rhodes and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate show him at his best (what one critic snidely called “nerd fantasy”). And, to give him his due, I really do prefer his A Gun for Dinosaur to Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (AGfD was deCamp’s take on “dinosaur hunting done right”)
I’m not ready to plunge into another Lovecraft bio now, so I went with the lighter and more predictable fare of a Clive Cussler (and Paul Kemprecos) Kurt Austin novel I hadn’t read, and picked up cheap, White Death.
On audio, I’m 3/4 of the way through Stephen King’s The Institute, which feels like Firestarter Revisited.
I gave up on it. Gave up on Bad Feminist, too. I clearly didn’t have good taste in books the week I chose those two.
Sometimes, we all need to read a little trash. 