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I've always been a sucker for a writer that sends me running to the dictionary, which is rare.
Jack Vance. What I love about him isn't so much that he knows every 50-cent word, but that he chooses them only if they express his meaning more precisely. As a result, he gets a lot more out of less word count than most people.
This week, I finished 'Black Venus', a collection of short stories by Angela Carter, and started 'Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire' by Calder Walton.
'Fatal Terrain', which I'm reading during lunchbreaks, is a book that you can't really get the most out of unless you have an all-consuming lust for massive great shiny aeroplanes.
Have you read any of Umberto Eco's historical fiction? He is one of the most challenging authors that I've enjoyed reading, because he expects his reader to keep up with his erudition.
I guess that question was directed to CatholicFan, but I wanted to read The Name of the Rose ever since I saw part of the movie. Imagine my surprise when I found that it was required reading for a college class I was going to take. I then went on to read it, long before the course started. During class, the instructors gave us all kinds of explanations about the book. After the course was over, I felt I just had to read the thing a second time with my newly acquired knowledge and appreciation.
Speaking of Lovecraft, I am currently on one of those 99 cent Kindle compilations. It's actually better than I expected: I was thinking it would all just be public domain pieces from the 1930's or older, but there are actually some stuff from as recent as the 80's, including a T.E.D. Klein story I hadn't read.
I haven't had a chance to read that, but his survey of the American labor movement, There Is Power in a Union was a decent read.
At the Hands of Persons Unknown is a decent read too, but I'm frustrated by the lack of footnotes. It seems he decided to start using them for the union book.
It's also a bit poppy beside that, but I'm more forgiving on that front since it's not a subject I've studied at length. Would probably be less frustrated still if I hadn't confused the book for a different one I recalled from a JAH state of field essay, but so it goes. Dray got a mention in one of the footnotes there and I suspect my memory migrated him up to the main text. Ah well, it only cost as much as a comic for the ebook and it's fine to get me situated. #historydorkproblems
Maybe he'll answer a question I've had for a while. Many lynchings ended with white people taking souvenirs. Bits of the rope, parts of the tree, and that kind of thing I figure become knickknacks and are quickly forgotten. Gobbets of flesh, fingers, toes, and other things not so much. What the hell did they do with the things? I want to know if they were brought out to show the kids the "right" way to deal with black Americans. Did anyone try to start a private collection of 'em, like they did lynching photos? Are there records of people who took something in the moment and then were disgusted with their disgusting selves and tried to make right somehow? Did the grandkids ever find stuff in a box and go WTF?
I've always been a sucker for a writer that sends me running to the dictionary, which is rare.Jack Vance. What I love about him isn't so much that he knows every 50-cent word, but that he chooses them only if they express his meaning more precisely. As a result, he gets a lot more out of less word count than most people.
I have a collection of Vance short stories on my to-read pile right now. I've read the Dying Earth series (a while back when I was looking at Appendix N titles), and you're absolutely right about his use of language.
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It's why I feel so refreshed reading Lovecraft right now. Sci-fi (or the macabre) should be a challenge to read, but those other books really felt dumbed-down.The gender stuff in Ancillary Justice didn't feel dumbed down or on the nose to me - I believe some very interesting things could have been done with the concepts there - they mostly felt... shallow. Not well thought out. The culture in this book is not very convincing or interesting, they don't really reflect on modern society or human nature in any meaningful way. They're just... colonial Britain with a bizarre gender fixation. I felt like the gender politics were really more of a gimmick than anything else.
Other than that, the book also featured uninteresting characters and barely had any plot, so I too am struggling to understand the amount of acclaim it garnered.
If you'r looking for a seriously challenging book that takes a strong hard stare at power dynamics and the way humans alienate each other, C.J Cherryh's Downbelow Station is excellent - and deserves the classic status it enjoys.
Oddly, those books, especially the later ones, reminded me a lot of Cherryh's stuff.
Not the gender stuff so much as the rest of the political plays and the later action sequences.
I'll have to concede to your (far) greater knowledge of the subject, as I only really read the one book from each of them. I intended to read more of Cherryh's stuff (Merchanter's Luck is probably next, as I'm really curious to see where the world from Downbelow Station is at after the events of that book), but have no real intention of continuing with Ann Leckie... so I guess I'll never know how similar I'd find their styles.
Ended up inserting "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" before "The Hound," after having found a better list for the mythos chronology. I could certainly tell it was one of his earlier stories, as it was stylistically closer to the other early tales than what I'm seeing reflected a couple years later in "The Nameless City."
Most of the tale is spent describing the great decadence that was found in the city of Sarnath. I suppose one could look at it like watching a great painter craft a beautiful fresco, only to have him take a knife to it at the very end. I did find myself wishing there had been a bit less time spent on the descriptives, and a little more on the details of how the city fell. The ending came off feeling very rushed, and that's a pity.
To the member that asked if I've read Umberto Eco, the answer is I have not. I saw the film version of In the Name of the Rose, and I believe I read his essay on Superman, but that's really been my only exposure to him that I can recall. He's an author that interests me, but I think he's probably pretty far down on my priority list.
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Re-reading The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Master Moorcock. Spent much too time last night pondering the significance of Agak and Gagak and pestering Mr. Comrade who, not too long ago, read Hawkmoon's version of the story.
Read "The Hound" to aloud to my partner. I got a response along the lines of, "Well, that was freaky." There's a definite jump in the level of macabre compared to the preceding Lovecraft works. In the scheme of the greater mythos, even though I didn't like the wordier style of previous stories, they do help ease a reader into the setting. I think if "The Hound" had been the first one I'd read, perhaps it would have been a bit much right off the bat.
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South Berwick’s Robert M. Pirsig, ‘Zen’ author, dead at 88
Zen had a pretty big effect on me in high school, even though I don't remember much of it. Something about the pre-Socratic sophists? Anyway, ride on, Robert.
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The Bestiary 6 and the Blood of Heroes rulebook (which is really an exact or near exact duplication of the old Mayfair Games "DC Heroes" rules). I'm very excited about both of them, but especially BoH. The greatest fun I ever had as an actual player and not a GM was a 12 year long DC Heroes campaign. I wish the guy who ran that game was still gaming. We had so much fun with that system and the adventures he came up with.
I'm currently reading "Guards! Guards!" By terry Partchett, it's a sort of comesic fantasy
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I'm more than halfway done with "The Wall of Storms" and only now has a character actually gotten to the wall of storms! On page 509 no less! Only 300 pages left to go!
I read the "Theros Ironfeld" Dragonlance novel to find out how he got his magic arm
And that was the last Dragonlance novel I read for 20 years.
Can't bring the house's only computer (a Chromebook) around with me, so to supplement my readings in China 1927, also read a pamphlet by my old comrades, Lenin and the Vanguard Party.
Boring Doctrinaire Communist Stuff
I've been hearing all kinds of things over the last few years, about how Lenin wasn't really a Leninist, democratic centralism as we understand it today was a Zinovievite invention, the Bolsheviks allowed public factional newspapers, etc., etc. I associate these claims with the work of the Canadian Leninologist Lars T. Lih, although that may be unfair because I haven't read him, just heard people telling me about him.
Anyway, this pamphlet, written in the mid-1970s decades before these controversies, has re-convinced me that proponents of such revisionism are latter-day Mensheviks. For example, yes, it turned out that Lenin did argue for a public factional newspaper in the RSDLP...when Kautsky and Bebel used the influence of the Second International to pressure the Bolshs and Menshs to re-unite in a single party...with the Menshs in organizational control.
Also, I was reconfirmed in my opinion that the comrades who trot out these arguments without taking into account Lenin's theory of the labor aristocracy in Imperialism and how that affected his ideas on the vanguard party have no idea what they are talking about.
The Bestiary 6 and the Blood of Heroes rulebook (which is really an exact or near exact duplication of the old Mayfair Games "DC Heroes" rules). I'm very excited about both of them, but especially BoH. The greatest fun I ever had as an actual player and not a GM was a 12 year long DC Heroes campaign. I wish the guy who ran that game was still gaming. We had so much fun with that system and the adventures he came up with.
Ah! I was too occupied to check these boards that week (due to Passover) so I didn't see this thread...
...or I would have said something. Outside of D&D / Pathfinder, no tabletop RPG influenced me more than MEGS. And when I first found Blood of Heroes I switched from DC Heroes to that.
Since I have the first edition and you have the second, maybe you can help me on a typo that's been bugging me for years and years. I mean... that BoH First Edition has many editing mistakes, but this one makes a rule particularly obscure. In the chart for the cost of APs during character creation, I'm looking at the column for Factor Cost 2. 13 AP's cost 56 hp's, 14 AP's cost 64 hp's, 15 AP's cost 60 hp's, 16 AP's cost 90 hp's, 17 AP's cost 100 AP's...
Whoa! That can't be right! How could 15 AP's cost less than 14?
AP hp
13 56
14 64
15 60
16 90
17 100
And the correct value isn't so easy to guess because the pattern changes. Going from 13 to 14 is 8 hp's, so maybe 15 AP's is 72 hp's. But going from 15 AP's to 16 AP's is 10 hp's, so maybe 15 AP's is 80 hp's. The answer could be anywhere from 72 to 80.
Could anyone with BoH 2nd Edition - or even DCH 2nd or 3rd Edition - help me out here?
I read the "Theros Ironfeld" Dragonlance novel to find out how he got his magic arm...
<spoiler>
...IT NEVER TOLD THE STORY OF HOW HE GOT HIS MAGIC ARM!!!!
</spoiler>And that was the last Dragonlance novel I read for 20 years.
The Dragonlance Chronicles saga certainly leaves some unsightly gaps. I've ranted about this before, but when I first heard the Lost Chronicles series was coming out, my first thought was "At last! Now we can finally hear the story of how Gilthanas and Silvara completed the Dragons of Deceit module. I especially wondered how Weis and Hickman - who, for all their faults, have a wonderful gift for characterization - would handle the shadowpeople. But no, we got nothing about that.
Also, I was reconfirmed in my opinion that the comrades who trot out these arguments....I see what you did there.
Wish I could say I did it on purpose, but I only noticed it after I posted.
The Dragonlance Chronicles saga certainly leaves some unsightly gaps. I've ranted about this before, but when I first heard the Lost Chronicles series was coming out, my first thought was "At last! Now we can finally hear the story of how Gilthanas and Silvara completed the Dragons of Deceit module. I especially wondered how Weis and Hickman - who, for all their faults, have a wonderful gift for characterization - would handle the shadowpeople. But no, we got nothing about that.I read the "Theros Ironfeld" Dragonlance novel to find out how he got his magic arm...
<spoiler>
...IT NEVER TOLD THE STORY OF HOW HE GOT HIS MAGIC ARM!!!!
</spoiler>And that was the last Dragonlance novel I read for 20 years.
I forget, is Theros getting his arm one of those parts of the module series they didn't novelize or was it something Weiss and Hickman made up for the books?
I forget, is Theros getting his arm one of those parts of the module series they didn't novelize or was it something Weiss and Hickman made up for the books?
The module DL7: Dragons of Light reveals the story of Theros getting the Silver Arm.
I guess if I had read more closely, I would have realized the question was already answered. Sorry, I meant to ask it earlier and just tossed it in after Aaron's post.
And Aaron's post comes in while I was typing. Oh, so different modules, huh? Thanks!
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Yeah, just to make my answer clearer, I don't think the PCs ever see Theros get the Arm, but they might be there to help him start forging dragonlances in DL7.
I guess if I had read more closely, I would have realized the question was already answered. Sorry, I meant to ask it earlier and just tossed it in after Aaron's post.
And here's another clarification: I didn't mean to imply that Dragons of Deceit had anything to do with the Silver Arm. I just mentioned the shadowpeople as another example of something missing from the Chronicles (because I happened to wish to see that particular "something").
I'm more than halfway done with "The Wall of Storms" and only now has a character actually gotten to the wall of storms! On page 509 no less! Only 300 pages left to go!I read the "Theros Ironfeld" Dragonlance novel to find out how he got his magic arm ** spoiler omitted **
And that was the last Dragonlance novel I read for 20 years.
W&H were not shy about only writing the bits of the modules they felt like. I was put off right when they dropped the thread down at Icewall into a song despite it sounding full of action and delivering important plot stuff...which I can no longer recall and fortunately will not be relevant to my PBP for some time.
I was put off right when they dropped the thread down at Icewall into a song despite it sounding full of action and delivering important plot stuff...which I can no longer recall and fortunately will not be relevant to my PBP for some time.
Yeah, the last two times I read the Chronicles I inserted the short story "Finding the Faith" into that part of Dragons of Winter Night. "Finding the Faith" tells the story of DL6: Dragons of Ice, so I came to regard the story as part of the series once I dismissed Dragons of the Highlord Skies as a waste of ink. I have "Finding the Faith" in The Magic of Krynn (a.k.a. Dragonlance Tales Book 1) but I understand that it also appeared in The Best of Tales, Volume One.
I'm glad I've moved on from DL....
Anyways, I just finished Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding. I forgot how suddenly it ended.
I'm going to read Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo before reading the second book in the Tales of the Ketty Jay series. It sounds like a cross between Oceans 11 and Game of Thrones. So it will probably be Oceans 3 by the end.... :-P
I'm currently reading The Temple of Elemental Evil, by Thomas M. Reid. I found it in a library book sale earlier this month, and it's apparently part of a series of TSR paperbacks from the early 2000s that novelized old classic Greyhawk adventures. I read my roommate's copy of ToEE back in college, and my wife has played through Return, so I was too curious to pass it up. It's not anything remotely resembling good literature, but I didn't expect it to be. I'm also not expecting a whole lot of the actual adventure to be detailed, because it's not a long book, and it's taken nearly half of it to get to the temple proper...
Edit: I fact, I'm expecting a glaring narrative ellipsis along the lines of that Icewall scene any page now...
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I'm currently reading The Temple of Elemental Evil, by Thomas M. Reid. I found it in a library book sale earlier this month, and it's apparently part of a series of TSR paperbacks from the early 2000s that novelized old classic Greyhawk adventures. I read my roommate's copy of ToEE back in college, and my wife has played through Return, so I was too curious to pass it up. It's not anything remotely resembling good literature, but I didn't expect it to be. I'm also not expecting a whole lot of the actual adventure to be detailed, because it's not a long book, and it's taken nearly half of it to get to the temple proper...
Edit: I fact, I'm expecting a glaring narrative ellipsis along the lines of that Icewall scene any page now...
And the heroes prepared to enter the dark and ancient temple.
<Chapter break>
"Whew! What a narrow escape that was! No one would ever believe how we got out of there."
Reid's novelization of The Temple of Elemental Evil had one scene that surprised me so much, I thought it made the otherwise unremarkable book worth reading. I've mentioned it before, like here for instance.
Aaron Bitman, now my curiosity is piqued. Can you Spoiler it? :-)
I already did, in the post to which I linked, but what the heck, here it is again:
Of course, this contradicted official Greyhawk continuity (or at least, my understanding is that Thrommel was never found) but who cares? You know, at the time that I read the novel, I had never seen the Temple of Elemental Evil module, and until reading the novel, I had always thought that the Scarlet Brotherhood had killed him!
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Finished At the Hands of Persons Unknown, which was ok. It's clear that the ebook was a rush job because there are some obvious OCR problems here and there. I feel like Dray did everything right for framing a survey but didn't quite connect the dots well enough. He uses individual lynchings as case studies and signposts for changing trends, as he should. Then he transitions to national anti-lynching politics to show the fallout. But it feels like there are two books here that don't quite mesh despite the tight integration. It might just be me.
All the same, I guess it's a fine pop history first book to read on the subject.
Started in with Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, David Donald's not particularly friendly biography of Sumner that remains the standard work. Donald is basically hostile to antislavery figures and politics from the start, though he wants to pretend otherwise in the 1989 forward.
Donald was honest enough to admit that lines critical of Sumner by his contemporaries were just more interesting to him in the same forward. That's both annoying and totally something I'd do. The archetypes for a successful, admirable public man in the nineteenth century are pretty narrow so even if the praise is all genuine it has a samey quality that the invective doesn't. And the invective is more fun. The big problem is that Donald sees Sumner's politics as arising from psychological problems, which is both typical of his historiographical tradition and super problematic. Mainly it relieves one of the need to delve further and understand historical actors in their context by pathologizing them.
But I am having spiteful fun in reading about Sumner's early life. Donald pretty clearly means the reader to take Sumner as diligent and ambitious but not that talented or educated. I'm reading about a scrappy kid succeeding against considerable adversity.
A little story: Sumner went to Harvard. He could only get in because the governor appointed his old man the sheriff of Suffolk County, which was a lucrative job considering their meager means. Harvard had a fixed uniform for students that specified black with no more than about 10% white added. Sumner got sick of that BS and bought himself a nice buff vest. The disciplinary board hauled him up and harangued him about the thing. Sumner argued, each time, that his vest was white and so compliant. After the third time they gave up and voted to specifically interpret his vest as white for purposes of the dress code.
I think Donald wants that to read as Sumner being an arrogant prick. I read it as Sumner not putting up with this b&*@~$~@ anymore.
I already did, in the post to which I linked, but what the heck, here it is again:** spoiler omitted **
Thanks! :-D
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I finished "The Wall of Storms"! Finally! As in book 1 the best parts were: 1. The bickering gods of Dara, 2. The advances in technology due to necessity, and 3. The fantastical setting. Note how only 1 of those deal with characterization. Liu is okay at some of his characters, but others (like Empress Jia) are Machiavellian plot-movers. I'm still looking forward to book 3 but I hope it isn't 800+ pages like this one.
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'Conan: The Road of Kings' by Karl Edward Wagner. Grimdark Conan, rather than Cheesy Conan (*cough* Lin Carter *cough*), though I don't have any problems with the latter. I liked it; I thought it was one of the better non-REH Conan stories, even if Karl still thought it necessary to describe the bosoms of more or less every woman who popped up in quasi-forensic detail. Naughty boy.
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More web-article than book, but: My Lousy Children are Both Fake Geeks by Robert J Bennet which was pretty darn funny.
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Read the Saxif D'Aan story in Sailor and then forgot the book over my parents' house. Looked through all the other Elric compendiums I have and none of them had Sailor (although, come to think of it, I neglected to look through Mr. Comrade's books).
Finally started Jhereg. Knowing who Brust's parents were, and having recently re-read Lenin and the Vanguard Party, I was mighty touched by the dedication (For my parents Who understand professionalism more than I ever will).
Read the preface at work between shifts. I don't know. I guess if I had known this was a book about a sorcerous assassin with a psionic link to his dragon familiar, I think I would have already read this. Also, I noticed that he used the word "psionic" twice in the first six pages.
I now have a vision in my head of Brust's home life, with his parents getting up at four in the morning to go sell Bulletin to the first shift at the factory, running into Stevie and his nerd friends--home for summer break and still up on Jolt and Mountain Dew, testinging out the rules in the brand new Eldritch Wizardry supplement from TSR--and shaking their heads.
(I was going to post an issue of the Bulletin from the year Eldritch Wizardsry came out but the Marxist Internet Archive only has from '65 to '74 online.)
Got sidetracked on The Crystal Shard. I'm enjoying it, but I picked up a copy of Hawk & Moor by Kent David Kelly. For those unaware (as I was before stumbling upon it last week), it's a look at the people behind D&D, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. I'm about 80 pages into it so far, and I really like it. It's less about game design and more about the designers, although the author makes a fair amount of speculation on possible influences on Gygax in the early part of the book. I'm thinking I'll be finishing this before going back to other books.
Read the Saxif D'Aan story in Sailor and then forgot the book over my parents' house. Looked through all the other Elric compendiums I have and none of them had Sailor (although, come to think of it, I neglected to look through Mr. Comrade's books).
Finally started Jhereg. Knowing who Brust's parents were, and having recently re-read Lenin and the Vanguard Party, I was mighty touched by the dedication (For my parents Who understand professionalism more than I ever will).
Read the preface at work between shifts. I don't know. I guess if I had known this was a book about a sorcerous assassin with a psionic link to his dragon familiar, I think I would have already read this. Also, I noticed that he used the word "psionic" twice in the first six pages.
I now have a vision in my head of Brust's home life, with his parents getting up at four in the morning to go sell Bulletin to the first shift at the factory, running into Stevie and his nerd friends--home for summer break and still up on Jolt and Mountain Dew, testinging out the rules in the brand new Eldritch Wizardry supplement from TSR--and shaking their heads.
(I was going to post an issue of the Bulletin from the year Eldritch Wizardsry came out but the Marxist Internet Archive only has from '65 to '74 online.)
The Jhereg series is really fun! It has lots of different magic systems, and it has some fun subversive elements. I like first person wise cracking detective-types. Sandman Slim, Dresden, Vlad Taltos, Kinsey Millhone, what's his name from Simon Green, etc.
I have been feeling a bit disconnected so I am rereading I am Aztlán.
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I like first person wise cracking detective-types.
When Brust cited Robert B. Parker, Roger Zelazny, and Alexandre Dumas as his top 3 literary influences, I was sold.
I read 'The Screwtape Letters' by CS Lewis today, which I probably would have appreciated more if I was a Christian.
Probably going to finish up the Semner biography tonight; there's only a chapter left.
After that I suspect I'm going to read An Anthropology of Marxism. Couldn't get a copy of the author's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition to hand in short order and the friend presently rereading it recommended this to me as a way to get a feel for his thoughts anyway.
Mainly the thing interests me because the more I've studied white supremacy the more convinced I am that a purely economic analysis is badly incomplete, even if economic understandings of white power have a lot to recommend them. If nothing else, there's a serious chicken and egg problem, but I also increasingly think that class and races are different axes of oppression which interact in complex ways while not really being the same thing. You can say race is a form of class and be mostly right, but it's also not simply synonymous with socioeconomic class. Having two parallel or interweaving systems of "class" strikes me as risking far too much confusion and elision. Plus it's counter-intuitive and I like to be parsimonious with making special definitions because I feel obligated to explain them when I do. Might a well admit it and call one racism.
Also had a fun time Friday night reading The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, a lovely forty-plus page historiographic review that didn't entirely persuade me of the author's case but gave me a stronger appreciation of the ambiguity I already knew something about in the sources. Anyway, it's pushed me a bit toward the side that antiblack white supremacy may have preceded slavery in Virginia but probably still not Atlantic World slavery in general.
The whole subject is excruciatingly fascinating because it's genuinely hard to parse out how racism develops with it coexists with national and religious prejudices which are often but not always synonymous. It's obvious that early modern Europeans were aware of skin color and such, but much harder to say when, where, how, and to what degree it was more important to them than Africans also not being Christians (or not "proper" Christians) or not Englishmen. I've read a few sources myself that treat all three categories as fundamentally interchangeable, but there are also sources that appear to privilege one category as more important. And specific to Virginia we're also talking about a short period of time: the first Africans arrive in 1619 and by the 1640s it's clear that racial identity has begun to have a predominant effect in settling status.
I meant Sumner, of course. Dammit.
Not sure I understand. Of course race and class aren't the same thing. I can't think of a single Marxist who argues they are.