{"id":13174,"date":"2010-07-19T14:32:52","date_gmt":"2010-07-19T18:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2010\/07\/19\/13174.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:56:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:56:01","slug":"book-report-a-princess-of-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2010\/07\/19\/book-report-a-princess-of-mars\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: A Princess of Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I can&#8217;t remember when I first read <a href=\"http:\/\/store.doverpublications.com\/048644368x.html\">A Princess of Mars<\/a>, the first of the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I assume that whenever it was, I must have been appalled by the racial stuff, because it is all so obviously appalling. But I must have been at least somewhat charmed by the action and adventure, because I retained somewhat of a positive feeling about the series.\n<p>One of the things about reading Victorian novels the way I have been these last few years is that it trains a reader to simultaneously be appalled and charmed. There is so much that is appalling about even the most enlightened and progressive Victorian, after all. And while Mr. Burroughs wasn&#8217;t quite a Victorian, he was the son of a Civil War veteran, born the year that Hans Christian Anderson and Leo Tolstoy died. Not that it&#8217;s any less appalling, but as I said that doesn&#8217;t stop me from being charmed.\n<P>And it is a charming book. It&#8217;s slow to get started&#8212;that whole introduction is not charming at all, and double appalling&#8212;but once John Carter gets to Mars, it sure starts to be silly fun and John Carter becomes a likable puppy dog of a hero. I particularly liked it when he got onto the flyer and promptly got completely lost. Probably my favorite part of the book, although the constant revelations of preposterous coincidences are a lot of fun, too.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger enjoys himself, actually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19140,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13174\/revisions\/19140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}