There are times I will recommend an author to someone just to make sure they read the whole series. Of course, I would recommend the complete “Lord of the Rings” books by Tolkien and The 7 Harry Potter books by Rowling. There are other authors I have talked about too.

My recommendation this week is not for a series of books, even though this author did have a few books that had a continuing story line. No, I started to read some of his other works, and I found them to be just as gripping as any other stories I read by him.

Look up the works of Sax Rohmer. He is chiefly remembered for his Fu Manchu stories, but he wrote other mystery novels that were as compelling. Stories are generally set in the early 1900’s through the 1930’s. This week I finished the stories “Bat Wing” and “Brood of the Witch Queen”. They are mystery/suspense stories with a little bit of the Occult or Voodoo thrown in. Both can be found at www.feedbooks.com.

I found that while I expected certain endings to both stories (I tend to do that reading mysteries), I was kept in the story by the plot and characters. I will be reading more of his books/stories in the future. I’m glad I took the time to examine his stories that did not involve Fu Manchu.

Title — Tarzan of the Apes
Author — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Year 1914
Digitized by Google Books from a 1914 copy Epub format

I have read this book before, but I decided to load it on my book reader and read it again.

This is not your Movie or TV Tarzan. The information about wild life (apes in particular) is a bit dated, but you should not let that keep you from reading any of Burroughs’ Tarzan stories. Tarzan of the Apes is the first in a long series of Tarzan novels written by Burroughs.

In this story, the apes that raised Tarzan are not Gorillas. Burroughs created a new smarter species to have a smarter animal to raise a human infant. This allowed Tarzan to ‘speak’ with the apes in the book. A good plot enhancement to allow the readers to have an early view of Tarzan’s young life in the wild. The apes themselves are seen as caring individuals (at least the female that took Tarzan to raise) and bloodthirsty savage beasts (almost all of the male apes). Tarzan was one of the bloodthirsty savages until he chanced upon meeting ‘white’ humans.

While reading this book, I had a feeling that it was written as a serialized novel. I seem to recall that a number of stories of this type were published in sections by numerous magazines of the time. I did a search on this and found out that this story was publish in full by the magazine it was submitted too. It may have been written as a serial novel, but it didn’t turn out that way. Just an interesting tidbit of information with this story.

I sat down to read this story knowing all of the above, I just pushed that aside and read this as I would any action/adventure tale. Except for Tarzan, the characters all seemed a bit flat. They were all secondary to story line. They were there to give Tarzan something to do. During the reading, I found that I didn’t really care what happened to them.

However, the background and setting of 1914 Africa came alive in the story. This was Tarzan’s supporting character. The descriptions of the ‘Jungle’ and its animal inhabitants kept the story flowing. This background gave the character of Tarzan some depth and meaning. While I didn’t care about the other characters, I did find myself interested in the way Tarzan felt about them. They were secondary, but his reactions were primary. I don’t recall too many stories that have me thinking in that fashion. I’m going to have to read more authors from the same time period to see if this is common in the era.

As far as the Ebook version, I did notice a few problems with the OCR conversion. It seemed to have problems with accented and capital letters. I’m not sure why that is, but there were a couple places it was an annoyance. I don’t remember this from the project Gutenburg book I read last year, but that was just a scan to PDF and not a digital reading/recognition of the words themselves.

I think that I would give this 3 out of 5 stars. Good book to read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to hunt it down.

Well not quite yet, but maybe a new category if I keep reading at the rate I have been. Since this is an Ebook review, there will be some things about the books that you will only get from the ebooks I’ve been reading. Almost all of the books have been copied from original text and had OCR software run on them. I’ve notice in a few places the character recognition software just wasn’t up to the task. I will have to note where I got the copy, how it was translated to digital text and the edition year it was copied from.

I’m thinking this will be a lot of fun for me, but my readers may be a bit bored by my reading selection. Oh well, you get what you pay for. I’m reading free books, and you are reading a free blog.

This week I finished 3 ebooks, so I have a choice as to which title to review. Decisions, decisions. Life sometimes complicates these things. 😉