Barsoom Brain-worms (I have 'em)

I was on vacation last week, during which I devoured Gods of Mars, the second of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, plus part of Warlord of Mars, the third. A Princess of Mars, the initial entry in the series, left me lukewarm when I read it a year or so ago. In Gods, it's like Burroughs tightened everything up -- the frame story is gone (aside from a brief opening vignette), and the plot whizzes from one action scene to another. Princess felt like a cumbersome 19th century novel in the vein of A Strange Manuscript Found in A Copper Cylinder or something by Jules Verne, whereas Gods feels like a 20th century pulp action story. For all their many, many shortcomings, Burroughs' books regularly manage to surprise me with something wildly strange or original, which is exactly what I want out of this kind of thing. Stuff like the elaborate natural history rattled off by the Xodar of the fact that Martian religion is apparently a double-layered cannibal conspiracy(!?), or the idea of a…