In my columns over the years, I've sometimes referred to the "Nerd Canon" (which has amused my editors no end). These are the books that the fanboys and fangirls in my generation sought out as the seminal works we needed to have read to have nerd cred.
Now, the Nerd Canon isn't static (nor should it be). It varies from generation to generation. But we all get the idea.
Then again, some books in the Nerd Canon aren't negotiable. I mean, a compleat comics fans knows Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" by heart.
My reading of the Nerd Canon started in elementary school library, where I instinctively began searching out anything that wasn't "normie." I'm pretty sure that's when I got the mythology bug. By junor high I was reading Edgar Allan Poe for sure -- my school library had a complete Poe, which I devoured -- all the Tarzan novels, lots of sword & sorcery (Conan, Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, etc.), "classic" SF writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, the Universal monter ouevre (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, etc.) and others. By the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read the Foundation trilogy, the Dune trilogy, Lord of the Rings, best of Robert Heinlein, best of Ray Bradbury (or possibly all available, as I really loved Bradbury), Michael Moorcock's Elric (and some of his other Eternal Champion stuff), some A.E. Van Vogt, some Philip K. Dick, a smattering of Harlan Ellison, Phillip Jose Farmer, E.E. "Doc" Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and others. I also read every Star Trek novel through the early '90s, but what started as a trickle in the late 1970s became a flood and I dropped them.
I eventually gave up on trying to be comprehensive on prose when cyberpunk came along. I read Neuromancer and didn't care for it, and discovered that I was completely out of step with SF fans. So I gave that up and stuck with comics.
If you're still reading at this point then I have some questions:
1) What was YOUR Nerd Canon? How does it differ or overlap with what I said above?
2) When I bought all those stories years ago, I bought them in paperback. That was in the '60s and early '70s. In the '80s, I sold my whole hoard to local bookstores for a couple of bucks -- less than a penny on the dollar. They simply weren't holding up. My Conan books, for example, were literally sticking to each other, and when you pried them apart, parts of the cover would be torn off. I don't know why that was, but it was. There was no point keeping them. So I got rid of them, to make room for stuff that would last.
And that brings us to the point of this thread. (At least for me.) I'm going to go ahead and buy some nice replacements for those old books. I've ordered some nice HC versions of the first four Tarzan books. I've got a gilt-edge Complete Sherlock Holmes collection, and will soon have similar for Conan.
So what else should I have for the library I will build and totter about in my dotage? What is my Endgame Nerd Canon?
Sound off, Legionnaires!
Replies
That's a good addition. I didn't read those when I read the rest of the canon, probably because they weren't on the paperback racks at the time. (I remember seeing some Executioner books, and similar, which didn't interest me.) It might have been too soon for them to be available in libraries, if it had occurred to me to look.
Bond should probably be included in any Nerd Canon (if Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Conan are, and as far as I'm concerned, they are), but it would have been especially pertinent for me, since I hit the canon in the mid- to late '70s. That would have been close enough to Bond's era that I wouldn't have to do too many mental gymnastics to accept the misogyny and racism.
I've got all the Bond books in a hodge-podge of formats and eras, and I'm thinking of getting the boxed paperback collection at Amazon while I have the money to do so (i.e., before I retire). I'd like a nice set for my Nerd Canon Library, especially one that isn't bowdlerized, which appears to be the future for Fleming's ouevre.
PLANET OF THE APES: I have always enjoyed the “Planet of the Apes” movies and have long owned the paperback movie adaptations as part of my personal “nerd canon.” There were also several paperback adaptations of television show episodes, but I didn’t own any of those… until recently. The brief popularity of the new series of movies led to the release of new paperback “omnibus” collections, even one that reprinted adaptations of the animated episodes.
M*A*S*H: This one is more individual (I suspect) but I still have the entire collection of M*A*S*H paperbacks (M*A*S*H Goes to New Orleans, M*A*S*H Goes to Paris, etc.). The only ones I have read multiple times are the three written by “Richard Hooker” (the original, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine and the last, M*A*S*H Mania). Every once in a while I almost pull one off the shelf, particularly M*A*S*H Goes to Texas, now that I live here.
Here’s the Wiki
I read the first M*A*S*H novel, because my brother had it. I enjoyed it, but enjoyed the movies and TV show more, so that book series faded from my to-do list. I might enjoy it more as an adult.
Honestly, don't bother. The only three worth reading are the three I mentioned above that are written by the original author ("Richard Hooker," although I believe his real name is Hornberger). The rest, "co-written" by William Butterworth, are crap. (Hornberger's pseudonem is on them, but he had nothing to do with them.) I did re-read M*A*S*H Goes to Texas after posting about it above, but I barely remember it.
"Nerd Canon" came up in conversation this weekend at a family gathering, and as I rattled off authors, I was asked "which books?" It's literally been 50 years since I waded through what I considered the canon at the time (and what was available). So I got to thinking again.
Isaac Asimov probably leads the list, but he wrote 500 books. I doubt anyone has read them all. I know I read the following:
Because those books stuck with me. I think I read others, like Fantastic Voyage (after seeing the movie), The Gods Themselves, The Robots of Dawn, Nightfall and Other Stories, The Martian Way, and several other titles that sound familiar. Doubtless other short stories in various Hugo and Nebula collections.
So what do you Legionnaires think? What's Asimov have you read? What stuck with you? What would you consider essential?
The only things by Asimov that I've read are the short story "Nightfall" and Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, which my Dad bought for me when I was a kid, and which was very useful in helping me to understand the context of Will's plays.
I wish I'd had that book in high school! It was clear to me even then that Shakespeare was writing specifically for his time and place, and figuring out 450-year-old slang wasn't in my wheelhouse.
You know from your Golden Age reading that it's not always easy to figure out elements of stories that were written just twenty years before we were born. Imagine a kid today who stumbles across their grandfather's collection of Silver Age Teen Titans stories and has no clue that teenagers didn't actually talk like that back then,
It would have to be annotated.
Ah, what's your beef with the way the Titans rap, Baronhead? You gotta glim the ginchy way those groovy swingers make the scene. It's the love-in generation, Daddy-O, and if you're like uptight you'll be left out of the blast. You dig?
("Beads, bells, incense, and Harvey Krishna, all you groovy freaks"-- Wink Dinkerson).
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
of 6 Next