Tarzan
All twenty-four Tarzan books as published. The run starts with a baby raised by apes and ends, improbably, with Tarzan fighting in the Second World War.
- You get a wonderfully strange coming-of-age story in which Tarzan learns the jungle’s rules from Kala and Kerchak, then finds himself pulled between ape life and human society. The prose is pulpy and the colonial assumptions are dated, but Tarzan’s fierce intelligence and loneliness keep the book surprisingly alive.
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: Tarzan moping through Paris salons, duels, a Russian villain named Rokoff who won't stay down, then the lost city of Opar. You have to be in the mood for coincidence-driven adventure, but if you are, it moves fast and never bores you.
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: Tarzan gets marooned by his enemy Rokoff and builds a war party out of Akut the ape, a panther, and the warrior Mugambi. If you want a revenge chase with zero downtime, this delivers; if you want depth, look elsewhere.
- Pure pulp adventure, and it knows it: Tarzan's boy Jack runs off with the old ape Akut and grows into Korak, half-feral and fiercely loyal to a girl named Meriem. If you can forgive the wild coincidences, it moves fast and the jungle stuff still works.
- You get Tarzan at his most feral and resourceful, moving through Opar’s ruins with Jad-bal-ja beside him while greedy men blunder after its treasure. It’s pulpy, violent, and gloriously improbable, with a dreamlike jungle atmosphere that makes the clunky bits worth tolerating.
- These are episodes from Tarzan's boyhood among the apes, before Jane, and the odd charm is watching him puzzle things out alone, like the chapter where he tries to figure out what God is. Pure pulp, cheerfully dated in places, but easy fun in short bites.
- You get Tarzan at his most grief-driven here: after finding his estate destroyed and Jane apparently dead, he turns vengeance loose across wartime Africa. The action is brisk and vividly pulpy, though the racist wartime caricatures and colonial assumptions can make this a difficult read.
- You get Tarzan dropped into Pal-ul-don, a hidden country of rival human peoples, dinosaurs, and wonderfully strange customs, with the loyal Om-at beside him. It’s pulpy and episodic rather than psychologically deep, but the lost-world invention keeps carrying you forward.
- By this point Burroughs is just having fun, and it's contagious: Tarzan raises a lion cub into a loyal killer, a con man impersonates him, and there's a lost city run by gorillas. Pure pulp, cheerfully implausible, best read fast on a lazy afternoon.
- You get Tarzan miniaturized in the country of the Minunians, where rival city-states wage war and he has to survive as an unwilling pawn. It’s gloriously odd, pulpy, and more interested in invention than plausibility, so you’ll enjoy it most with your appetite for strange detours switched on.
- This is the one where Tarzan stumbles on a lost valley of crusaders' descendants still jousting in full armor, and an American named Blake gets swept into their knighthood. Pure pulp adventure, cheerfully absurd, and Burroughs knows it.
- You get Tarzan in expedition mode here, tracking a missing German family into a hidden Roman-descended empire deep in Africa. It’s a stranger, more old-fashioned adventure than the jungle books, with elaborate customs and court intrigue, so you’ll enjoy it most when you’re happy to let Burroughs wander.
- You get Tarzan alongside Jason Gridley in Pellucidar, Burroughs’s bizarre inner world of dinosaurs, savage empires, and perpetual daylight. It’s pulpy and exuberant rather than subtle, with the crossover feeling like a glorious excuse to pile two adventure series into the same wonderfully overstuffed machine.
- public domain 2027
- public domain 2028
- public domain 2028
- public domain 2030
- public domain 2029
- public domain 2032
- public domain 2034
- public domain 2034
- public domain 2043
- public domain 2060
- public domain 2061