Given the movie that is about to come out based on this series…I’d like to recommend A Princess of Mars -by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Its a very easy read and I think a nice way for people who may be interested in the movie to learn a little bit more about the characters and setting.
Also: There’s a more than fair chance John Carter will be the Sunday movie/podcast for the 2012 meetup.
Cant wait to see the movie! The John Carter series was one of the first set of books I picked up from the library as a young kid and really sparked my love for Fantasy/Sci fi. So, I hold the series in high regard =)
A funny story regarding the Movie. People may not be aware, this ISN’T the first time the series has been made into a film. When I first signed up for Netflix, I noticed they had A Princess of Mars on Instant stream! AWESOME. Click Play
yeah…the movie has the Stellar cast including both TRACI LORDS and ANTONIO SABATO Jr (seriously??)
Yeah…the movie was HORRIBLE. I love the series and I couldn’t watch more than 15 minutes of this film…and that was about 14 minutes longer than it should have been watched hah.
Needless to say, the current rendition looks SO much better.
I read about 5 or six of the books back in High School, around 76 or 77. Back then they still had the Frazetta artwork which added to the mystique. They were fun but after awhile they became rather formulaic. And I moved on to Conan novels, and then later on I think it was the Hitchhiker series… 
I even have an old (and I do mean oooolllldddddd) hardbound copy of ERB’s Escape on Venus with Frazetta artwork.
I also only survived 15 minutes of that movie, but because it was a SyFy produced film I had low expectations anyways…
Saw and loved JOHN CARTER, and so was inspired to seek out the source material. I’m only a few chapters in, but I like it so far. Burroughs is doing a lot of “info dumping” at the outset, and there are telltale signs that the book is (as all books are) a product of its time (the “red Injuns” stuff), but I can see why this world of Barsoom has captivated so many.
Agree that the SyFy “Princess of Mars” is a horrible monstrosity. If you want to see a bad John Carter movie, that’s where you should look, not to the Disney film! Oh, well. I will give them some mild marks for effort for stating that Carter is being teleported to “another Mars,” not the one in our solar system. I think something along those lines - maybe, a quick reference to parallel worlds, the way the Disney film uses a real, quantum science explanation for Carter’s journey (i.e., the theory that any real teleportation will involve duplication of the subject) - might have gone some way toward “shoring up” the film in critics’ eyes. Just a thought.
yeah…the movie has the Stellar cast including both TRACI LORDS and ANTONIO SABATO Jr (seriously??)
daSnarf
Oh my god . . . I must see this film!
Remember, you can never UNSEE something… (just a warning) 
I can only second that warning…
Hm just saw this. I also just saw John Carter this afternoon and I wonder how Dejah Thoris is portrayed in the book (since she was pretty kick-ass in the movie). But I worry, since the whole product-of-its-time bit.
Well Casilda, you can get the e-book or audio file of Princess of Mars here:
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.html/?default_prefix=all&sort_order=downloads&query=Princess of Mars](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.html/?default_prefix=all&sort_order=downloads&query=Princess of Mars)
Yeah, I am reading the book now, and I don’t think Dejah is quite as all-around awesome as she is on the screen, so score several points for the filmmakers in that regard!