My didn’t May fly by?
After reading the two Howard books that arrived recently I went back to my collection and dug out some other books by Howard to read. I’ve went through a fair bit. I have an old hard back of Skull Face and Others and dipped in and out of that, along with paperbacks of Solomon Kane stories and other collections. (As an aside I recently saw the film Solomon Kane, released last year or the year before: abysmal, Howard would go on a bloody rampage against the film makers for such drivel.) His stories set in the Crusades are brilliant. A recent 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s had a – shock horror – short story collection among them. Collections of short stories are getting rarer and rarer nowadays: not like the old days when, particularly in Science Fiction, they were ten a penny. I remember I had more Robert Silverberg short story collections than novels from him.
Other recent rediscoveries were playing the guitar. I dug my guitar out and put new strings on it, and then dug out the 8 track recorder. I have an effects pedal somewhere but with the 8 track it’s superfluous. It’s a Boss CR-600 and a few years old but is still full of surprises as to the amount of things it can do. It’ll take me a while to build up the muscles on my left hand and harden my fingertips again – and get back into making half decent music – but it’s fun playing once more.
