Date: 2008-05-06 18:39 Subject: What am I reading? Security: Public Location: Huntsville, Alabama Mood: not dead

Well currently, I’m reading: 1. Cartomancy which is the sequel to the book Michael Stackpole gave me for free last Comic-Con. 2. A Scholar of Magics by Caroline Stevermer which I took an awfully long time to get my hands on considering that I read the previous book every couple of years. 3. The rulebook for Spirit of the Century in the hopes of playing it in an online game soon. 4. Weapons of the Gods Companion, an expansion to a role-playing game that, while my one attempt to run it didn’t go well, it was a lot of fun to read.

But what I really want to talk about is a book I’m not, technically, reading, because I have it on my iPod. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, volumes one and two. I can still picture the battered paperback I had as a kid that I read through many times, and I was thrilled to find it at the library because it’d been decades since the last time. While I am familiar with the animated versions  (Chuck Jones did an excellent job with Rikki Tikki Tavi… Disney, not so much with the Mowgli stories) it’s the original stories that made such an impression on me… or so I thought.

I expected to just reacquaint myself with beloved stories from my youth, but I’d forgotten that there were parts of that book that I had never bothered to read. While Tumai of the Elephants and The Miracle of the Langours don’t ring a bell at all, I know that Servants of the Queen was in my book, yet I had never read it. The one I’m in the middle of now, The Undertakers, is the new discovery I like best so far. It’s a discussion between a crane, a jackal, and a crocodile, and I wonder if those are all Egyptian gods of the dead which would explain the title. None of the stories I’ve discovered so far have involved Mowgli, so I can see why I might have skipped over them, but I can’t help but wonder if there are other stories from my childhood that I don’t know as well as I think. Was there a little stuffed lamb in the Hundred Acre Wood whose adventures never engaged me? A Narnia book that I never got through? (That’s possible, actually, because I have no recollection of The Silver Chair save that the cover showed a prince heroically stabbing a chair). Forgotten stories aside, the ones I remembered have not lost any enjoyment for me, and my favorite (Red Dog) is still to come.