Louis L’Amour

Does it say more about me or about the book if I can remember the cover more than the cover?

Between the ages of 6 and 10, I spent serious time studying the covers of the books in my dad’s Louis L’Amour collection. This guy has a cool horse. This guy with the sledgehammer and no shirt and the start of a beard… I want to be him someday. And him. And him.

I wish I could see who the artists were. I’ve heard people say their image of manhood was formed by John Wayne movies. Mine was formed by Louis L’Amour paperback covers in the 1970s.

As super-prolific authors go, he wasn’t bad. Far above Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, because L’Amour had more stock plots. There were about the same number of characters, but his oeuvre has more plots.

Like most super-prolifics, he had a formula. It involved a minor fight within the first few pages, a major crisis of some sort about a third of the way through, a building solution for the next third, and lots of shooting at the end. The hero is always a cowboy, but of a more sexually-moral character than those you’d find in Willy Nelson songs.

I wrote the list below before writing this little review. For each book, I’m almost sure I could sketch the cover. But I can’t remember much about the specific contents.

You can get most of them free online now.

If you like Bernard Cornwell, try L’Amour, and vice versa.

These are the ones I read, between ages seven and twelve:

A Man Called Noon

Bendigo Schafter

Comstock Lode

Down The Long Hills

Fair Blows the Wind

Flint

Hills of Homicide

Hondo

Jubal Sackett

Lando

Last of the Breed

Last of the Breed

Milo Talon

Mojave Crossing

Reilly’s Luck

Ride the River

Sackett

Sackett’s Land

Sitka

The Daybreakers

The First Fast Draw

The Lonely Men

The Quick and the Dead

The Sackett Brand

The Walking Drum

To the Far Blue Mountains

Treasure Mountain

West From Singapore

Yondering

War Party

Edgar Rice Burroughs

I was eight years old when I first saw Tarzan of the Apes on my dad’s bookshelves. He told me I was too young to read it. Too violent.

But he let me read it the next year, and I was hooked.

My dad was right: it was too violent. It was also too racist, too sexist, too nationalistic, and too Darwinisitic. But it was…it was Tarzan!

Over the next five years, I scoured the used book stores and libraries for every title I could find:

Tarzan of the Apes

The Return of Tarzan

The Beasts of Tarzan

The Son of Tarzan

Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

Jungle Tales of Tarzan

Tarzan the Untamed

Tarzan the Terrible

Tarzan and the Golden Lion

Tarzan and the Ant Men

Tarzan Lord of the Jungle

Tarzan and the Lost Empire

Tarzan at the Earth’s Core

Tarzan the Invincible

Tarzan the Triumphant

Tarzan and the City of Gold

Tarzan and the Lion Man

Tarzan and the Leopard Men

Tarzan’s Quest

Tarzan and the Forbidden City

Tarzan and the Magnificent

Tarzan and the Foreign Legion

Tarzan and the Madman

At the Earth’s Core

Pellucidar

Tanar of Pellucidar

Back to the Stone Age

Land of Terror

Savage Pellucidar

A Princess of Mars

The Gods of Mars

The Warlord of Mars

Thuvia Maid of Mars

The Chessmen of Mars

The Master Mind of Mars

The Fighting Man of Mars

The Swords of Mars

Synthetic Men of Mars

Llana of Gathol

John Carter of Mars

The Mucker

The Land that Time Forgot

The People that Time Forgot

Out of Time’s Abyss

The Cave Girl

The Moon Maid

The Moon Men

The Lad and the Lion

The Eternal Savage

The Mad King

The Monster Men

I Am A Barbarian

The Outlaw of Torn

Apache Devil

The War Chief

Carson of Venus

Pirates of Venus

Lost on Venus

Escape on Venus

The Wizard of Venus.

Burroughs wrote a lot, but this review won’t take too long because he only had a few plots:

1. hero finds self in unlikely place, not only survives but surpasses the natives, becomes a superhero, wins love from most desirable woman in unlikely place

2. hero loses memory, bad things happen, hero gets revenge

3. bad guys attack hero’s family/country/home, hero gets revenge

4. hero’s identity is stolen, hero gets revenge

5. hero seeks treasure and finds it (and gets revenge)

6. plagiarized plots from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Zane Gray

The themes varied a little during his four decades of writing, but if you read more than 50 pages of any of his books, regardless of where the book is set, you’ll notice that he’s writing about a world in which…

1. Brits and Americans rule

2. If Brits and Americans are not present, then power goes to White Men (except for Germans)

3. women who white men want are next in line (but they don’t have to be white)

4. dark-skinned characters range from sneaky/tricky to noble assistants, kind of like dogs

5. Civilization is only skin deep

6. Honor is so deep (in non-Germanic white men) that it never needs to be taught

7. Honor means not having sex

8. When all else fails, magic or reincarnation can save the day

9. Science is a tool for men who are too weak to bite or stab

10. It’s not wrong to kill people who aren’t like you, if you’re a white man

11. Darwin’s always right

Around title 30, I started to lose interest, but there were new series, and I might have a slightly addictive personality, and there was always a chance I’d find something that made me feel like that first Tarzan book did.

But then I was saved by my 9^th-grade English teacher.

He never said anything bad about Burroughs, but he introduced me to Dickens, and he read A Tale of Two Cities with me, and talked to me about it.

And I never wanted to read Burroughs again.

When I was 17, I decided the world would probably be better if his books weren’t around, so I threw my collection away.

Khaled Hosseini and John Knowles

“His jaw was broken and wired shut, so when he spoke, he sounded like a famous actor playing someone whose jaw had been broken and wired shut.”

Such is the literary richness you can find in the enthusiastically over-rated The Kite Runner. The quotation isn’t exact, but it benefits from two strengths that the original lacked: it is brief, and it doesn’t appear twice on the same page.

The Kite Runner is set in Afghanistan during the Russian war and rise of the Taliban. A Separate Peace is set in a prep school. The Kite Runner involves homosexual rape; A Separate Peace involves homosexual subtext. Other than that, they belong on the same shelf. Both are coming-of-age stories written by middle-aged men with either exceptionally vivid imaginations or a lot of reason for regret. Both involve sniveling adolescent protagonists whose envy of their confident peers leads them to tragic betrayals, plot twists that would have made Edgar Rice Burroughs cringe, and poetic justice meted out in the imaginative equivalent of capital letters and bold font.

At the risk of ruining some of the surprises, I’ll reveal the formula:

A good runner? He’ll break a leg.

A myopic mentality? He’ll lose an eye.

An insistence on truth? He’ll be deceived.

A true man? He’ll get raped.

If the books share the same fate, the The Kite Runner will someday also join the 9^th-grade reading lists, and millions of students will come to see them as examples of symbolism and character types and plot manipulation. Those things are worth learning. Hopefully, the students won’t also learn how to use cowardice, weakness, and treachery as sympathy-builders in the way Hosseini and Knowles do.