Man vänjer sig.

1. Robert Asprin: Another Fine Myth
2. Robert Asprin: Myth Conceptions
3. Arto Paasilinna: Harens år
4. Carsten Palmær: Liten ordlista för nusvenskar
5. Jacqueline Carey: Kushiel's Dart
6. James H. Schmitz: Telzey Amberdon
7. Fred Saberhagen: Berserker
8. Lois McMaster Bujold: Cordelia's Honor
9. Arto Paasilinna: De hängda rävarnas skog


10. Tintin en Amérique (original version 1932, this colour version 1945; English translation "Tintin in America" 1973)

When I got home yesterday I found a package in the mail: a birthday present (one day early) from my sister and my brother-in-law. When I opened it I found the mid-70s printing of Tintin en Amérique that BIL mentioned that he'd found at a flea market. (No printing year is given, but it lists Tintin et le lac aux requins but not Tintin et les Picaros, which places it between 1972 and 1976. It's probably spent some time in a basement somewhere, judging by the slight smell.) While my French is not brilliant it's good enough for me to read bandes dessinées without the aid of a dictionary, so that's what I did.

Admittedly, as one of the first three albums Tintin en Amérique is very far from the cream of the crop, but it is definitely not as haemorrhagingly godawful as Tintin au pays de Soviets or Tintin au Congo. Hergé was still only in his mid-twenties when he wrote this album, and his later meticulous research is nowhere to be seen here. Nothing ever rises above the level of the popular cliché, but the naive racism in the previous adventure (which Hergé himself was ashamed of only a few years later) is thankfully gone; the Indians, while antagonists, are easily the most sympathetic of the lot. There is no actual plot, as Hergé wrote the whole adventure in weekly instalments and sometimes didn't know what was going to happen until a few hours before the deadline; still, while it's very very far from a masterpiece, it's a mildly entertaining way to kill half an hour.