Welcome to Litsy!

Skipping Jungle Tales for now since it‘s prequel short stories.

Just got to get through this one to get to my Tarzan the Terrible reread!

Tarzan and Jane are in their early(?) forties in this book. Jane is perfectly willing to shoot at invaders, but now she‘s escaped one kidnapper and has been kidnapped by an ape.

Tarzan thinks she smells vaguely familiar but apparently his amnesia comes with ape ADHD and he keeps getting distracted. You can tell it was originally published as a serial from the chaotic plot and constant cliffhangers, but this one definitely hits the absurd.

How can I resist a cheesy amnesia plot?

I enjoyed all seven stories to some degree, so overall 4⭐

My favourite two were "Bazaar of the Bizarre" by Leiber, with his humorous take, before that was a thing, on a more typically grim genre &; Mazirian the Magician by Vance, which is just classic low fantasy, and makes me regret having let go of his Dying Earth books sometime in my prehistory.
Editor, de Camp's, offering was interesting in his intention of making his story more realistic,⬇️

The penultimate story is Jack Vance's "Mazirian the Magician", which I read around 1980 in his "The Dying Earth" collection. It's a wonderful story of the Magicians' Duel variety, in an exotic far-future setting. Vance's magic system inspired Gary Gygax's AD&D wizardry, with mages able to memorise a set of spells which they forget as they cast them and have to relearn from grimoirs.
Mazirian is an interesting character of an unpleasant kind ??

#CatsOfLitsy
I am honoured that Skye has chosen to sit next to me while I read (yes, a cat post, but there's a book in the photo so don't @ me! 😏)
She's a rescue cat who is still settling in with us, & while she's sweet she's also excitable & scratchy (her tail is lashing as I write & I'm suppressing my urge to stroke her!). She does like being picked up & held & will allow strokes then, so I wander around the house like a mad cat-person!👨🏻‍🍼

"The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man."

- The Hoard of the Gibbelins, Lord Dunsany

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

The first of the stories is a Fritz Leiber tale of Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, with the added bonus of featuring their wizardly patrons, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes & Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
In decadent Lankhmar's Plaza of Dark Delights, a gaudy new shop appears overnight. The wizards separately dispatch their protegés to end this extradimensional threat, the Mouser, typically, letting his curiosity & sybaritic tastes get the better of 👇🏻

Second edition of this collection of seven sword and sorcery tales. Published 1968, bought 1979, finally made it off Mount TBR 2025. 49 years of well-aged magic and mayhem! 😄

This is a comfort read as I've actually read many of the stories in other collections. Some favourite characters here, including Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric of Melniboné and Conan the Barbarian. Let the swashbuckling begin! ⚔️

Well, it‘s a lot better with the context of the first two books but still not my favorite.