Which conan book to read first

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David Baldacci Louise Penny C. Feeling Lucky? On Social Media! November Poll Do you look back fondly on the books you had to read for school? Yes No Maybe, if I could remember them! I'm still in school View Results. November Book Of The Month. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. RPGnet Member. Validated User. So I got a fairly complete collection of Howard's Conan stories, none of which I read so far, and I'm wondring what the correct order of reading to follow Conan's chronology rather then the publication order?

JonMonster Doop de doo Validated User. If it's Howard, I'd say that there is no bad way to read the stories. Chronologic by publication or by Conan's experiences, it doesn't really make much difference in the enjoyment.

I first read them in no particular order in high school and then read them in publication order, and they are great both ways. The random order is fun when you read them in a short time frame because you can spot fun callbacks. The publication order Davies Active member Banned. There've been a number of attempts to put the Conan stories into a chronological order. All of them have been controversial in one way or another.

Last edited: May 26, J Harper May I interest you in a stuffed monkey? Several different authors have tried to put together a chronology, but according to Wikipedia :. A completely consistent timeline that would accommodate every existing Conan story is impossible for several reasons.

These include: a errors that crept into the earliest chronologies b subsequent disregard by the early chronologists of chronological evidence in later-discovered Conan material contrary to the existing schemes c similar disregard for this contrary evidence in the writing of much post-Howard Conan material, and d disregard of both the existing chronologies and chronological information established in previous stories by Howard and others in the writing of other post-Howard Conan material.

The page I linked to has several of the major chronologies, so you could either pick one of those I'm considering following the Robert Jordan version, since I'm a big fan of his , or you could look to see where they're similar and make your own.

I have the conan stories by Howard in the Gollancz Fantasy masterworks series. Its two books and claims the have all the conan stories by Howard in in-universe chronological order. That does not seem to be the order in which they were written. The 12 book series published by Ace that attributes the authors as Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter is an excellent start. The series includes stories by Howard that were published and unpublished, and the other two authors finished partially written manuscripts and outlines and ideas left by Howard.

Howard had a grand chronology in place from early on, including maps, but he did not publish the stories in chronological order. As for other works I have not noticed that the authors totally respect the original Howard vision.

Perhaps some do. I would not consider works outside of these 12 books to be canonical. Truly the stories are not meant to be read in order. The stories were not published in a any particular order because REH meant for the reader to believe that the teller of the story, Conan, told the stories as he remembered them randomly.

Source: "As for Conan's eventual fate - frankly I can't predict it. In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.

Howard, Letter to P. Miller, March 10, Sign up to join this community.