The Books We Read

Well, not all of them. Some of them are in Greek.

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I wish that I could write some introduction paragraph about how the ghost of Edgar Rice Burroughs guided my hand as I wrote and designed this issue. Hell, I can’t even say that his words have inspired me since childhood and that I’m a lifelong fan. No, the boring story behind it is that I didn’t really get into the Barsoom series until I was in college. Sure, I’d heard the name - I knew he’d written the old Tarzan books - but I didn’t really start to love the pulps until I was 19 or 20. 

Truth be told, I wasn’t even what I would consider a “reader” until my Junior year of highschool in 2003. I kept up with school assignments most of the time, but I didn’t read much outside of that just for the fun of it. I’d finished The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia by middle school. That was about the same time I started to play Dungeons and Dragons, around ‘98/’99, right before Third Edition came out. This was back when it was still AD&D. After that I moved on to a couple out-of-order Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms paperbacks. It's almost embarrassing to admit that the book that turned me into a reader was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. 

My mother, who was a voracious reader, had been gifted a copy of it when it first came out. I’ll never know what possessed her to do so, but after she read it, she handed it to me and suggested that I sit down and read it. 

So I did.

And I didn’t go to bed until the early morning hours because I kept reading it.

I didn’t read it straight through. This was before I started eating books for breakfast - before I started writing fiction and got a degree in English - and was a slow reader. It took me about a week to finish it. At the time, that was an accomplishment. I might as well have read it straight through and done nothing else in that week. I didn’t know that books could be so fast, so aggressive - so transgressive. I wanted more. 

That led me into detective fiction. I started reading James Lee Burke. He was, sort of, a local writer from the Lafayette area. We claimed him at least. His new books always had a table at the Barnes & Noble. I moved on to Lawrence Block and Elmore Leonard. I went back to the beginning with the likes of Dashielle Hammet and Raymond Chandler. I discovered James Elory and Paul Auster and Jim Thompson. I found Don Westlake in the covers of the Hard Case Crime series at a Dollar General and have been obsessed ever since.

And I was absolutely shook by Chester Himes. 

Being an English major in college, I got to read all sorts of books from around the world, but when I had time to myself, and I could read a book for fun again, I always picked up something hard boiled. 

In 2007 or so I got to take a class about French detective fiction. It was taught by a Belgian man who hated root beer and baseball. He introduced me to my next loves; Georges Simenon, Leo Malet, and Jean-Claude Izzo. More than anything, though, he loved The Adventures of Tintin. He’s the one who, on some random Tuesday afternoon without much fanfare or warning, introduced me to the pulps, specifically Princess of Mars. 

A few months later I saw a collected copy of the first three books of Barsoom on closeout in the bargain bin at the bookstore. I bought it on a whim. It was only a couple of books. I read all three of them over a weekend and put it up on my shelves. 

I wasn’t obsessed and unable to think about anything else ever since. 

I didn’t devour the rest of them like a word starved gnoll. 

I didn’t proselytize the amazingness of Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

But it never did quite leave me alone. It was always there, nagging at the back of my head. I always wanted to do something with it. It stuck with me in a way that I can’t quite explain other than to say it was like a scar on my imagination, and every time I rubbed fingers over the raised skin of it, I remembered how it got there and wondered how long I would look at it. It took hold of me in a way that even my favorite books never did. Where I was satisfied with the other stories from all the other writers that I ever read just as they’d left them, there was something about Barsoom that made me want to explore it more. I wanted to see what else was there. 

And after all these years, here I am. This is my first attempt at doing something of my own with something that hasn’t left me alone yet. In a lot of ways, I don’t want it to. This is just the start. I’ll be back to it. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that I’ll be back to the Red Planet, wanting to know more about those red and green men, about John Carter and Dejah Thoris. I’ll be back to leave my own footprints on that Martian soil. 

And I hope that you stick around with me until I do. 

As for housekeeping stuff, Bookied - the game of gonzo sports betting - is coming along. We’re getting through playtesting and revisions. It’ll be out this summer, exact date TBA.

If you like what we’re doing, let us know! Follow us on our socials, send us an email, whatever works for you. It's really that feedback we’re living for at the moment. 

Thank you all for spending time with us. 

-Dave Serrette
Founder/Writer/& Cetera @Downsized Press