I am reading Waiting to Launch: The Untapped Global Potential of Gaelic Games by Eamonn Gormley. I knew a little about the sports of GAA before this, and am learning even more.
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I read the first volume of the comic DIE not long after the collection was published, but that was a few years ago now. Then just last month, I discovered that the public library had four volumes of it, so I snagged 'em all. I just finished Vol. 3 over lunch today. It's a fascinating--if frequently brutal--story, with some amazing art. And for a RPG and literary geek like me, it's fun to see all of the references that have been worked in (both the heavily plot-relevant ones, and the glittery little background details).
It's one of my favorite comics in the last 5-10 years. Bar none.
'The Talmud: A Selection', trans. Norman Solomon, and 'The Knight of the Swords' by Michael Moorcock, the latter for around the the 20th time.
I recently finished reading "The Left Hand of Darkness."
A good book that does the build up to nationalism and isolation, both social and physical, really well.
My mind wasn't blown by the exploration of gender, but I figure this is due to my long involvement in scifi and fantasy and that I live in a Post Advent of Left Hand of Darkness World.
I’ve had a really nice copy of that for a few years now. I’ve really go to get around to reading it.I just started Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
Also, this thread is almost at 10k posts. We seem to be voracious readers.
Although I don't check these boards nearly as often as I used to, it seems odd that I never noticed this post before. Yeah, I regard the original Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) as my favorite science fiction prose series of all time. I read it 3 times. That series began the whole cliche of a Galactic Empire, imitated so many times thereafter. It was pretty awesome to get such a vivid picture of a whole galactic empire just from a few simple conversations. But best of all is its use of psychohistory; just you wait and see!
For a long time, I've been working on reading the 16 original Dragonlance modules from 1984-1988, on and off (mostly off).
Usually, when I read a D&D module, I would read the beginning premise, but then when I get to the details - the room-by-room descriptions, the monster combat tactics, and such - I get bored of it and skim through or utterly skip over large chunks of that stuff. I don't typically read every detail unless I plan - or at least hope - actually to RUN the adventure, which I usually don't.
What interests me in RPGs is the story. I loved the Dragonlance Chronicles novel trilogy, which I read 5 times, and the Dragonlance Legends novel trilogy, which I read 4 times. I got a lot of Dragonlance gaming material and read some parts of it with interest, simply to enhance my understanding of the novels, although I never expected to run anything in the setting.
In 2000, I got a new but affordable reprint of the complete 1st-edition Dragonlance modules - from DL1 though DL16. They were affordable because they were reprinted in miniaturized format. I didn't actually plan to strain my eyes reading those, but I flipped through them. Every now and then I'd feel curious about some detail or other and look that up. Here's an example of one such detail. Or for another example, this post made me curious to look up THAT detail.
But in early 2019, I finally got around to starting to READ the DL module series, thoroughly. And although I found the first module fascinating, after a while the series went the way of most adventures - location descriptions, monster tactics, and details like that. But now and then, I would read a little detail - which I had missed in my brief skim-throughs - that I would find fascinating. That motivated me to read carefully.
Well, okay, I don't claim to have read every word. I certainly didn't scrutinize every stat block. And I skipped some parts which related details I had covered in reading later Dragonlance material in full-size format, which was easier on the eyes. Still, I feel I covered that stuff pretty darn thoroughly.
And because of that attention to detail, I would soon get bored and put the module series down, sometimes for many months at a time. But I would eventually get back to it.
In fact, many of those details are pretty bad. If I ever were to run a "War of the Lance" campaign, I might start with DL1, but I would change the rest of the campaign tremendously. I could go on and on about how I might change it.
I guess I've mentioned this before. In 2020, on this thread, I related reading DL7: Dragons of Light. Here's a link to that post.
And last week, after THREE AND A HALF YEARS of this, I finally finished DL14: Dragons of Triumph from 1986, which brought the whole epic to a conclusion. To me it seems like quite an accomplishment.
Well, that was the REAL end to the series. But I mentioned above that I had the original sixteen modules. I guess that in 1988, in an effort to capitalize on the success of Dragonlance, TSR released DL15 and DL16, consisting mostly of adventures set in the Dragonlance universe. I just started DL15: Mists of Krynn.
I tend to not read adventures unless I am sure I am going to run them, or at least reasonably sure I will. I guess I am always holding out hope that I will play in them. This means I have a whole lot of adventures for many different RPGs sitting unread in my bookcase, let alone all the ones I have in PDF format.
I tend to not read adventures unless I am sure I am going to run them, or at least reasonably sure I will. I guess I am always holding out hope that I will play in them.
Heh. Well I must say that if some GM told me "I'm running the DL series; do you want to play?" and I replied "Just as a disclaimer, I read all those modules," there's a good chance that GM would be fine with that. The authors of those modules were very conscious of the possibility that the players might have read the novels, so a lot of the secrets were multiple choice. I mean to say that as written, the modules often have the GM determine - randomly! - what the various secrets - of the gods and such - were. That the secrets were those revealed in the novels was only one of many possibilities.
If I were that GM I would never determine such things randomly but I would definitely make the secrets very different from anything a reader of those modules would expect. And I would stat out many of the monsters and NPCs differently too, for that matter.
I am, of course, only speaking of the original Dragonlance series. I'm not saying that this would apply to any other adventures.
'How To Behave Badly in Renaissance England', by Ruth Goodman. I really, really enjoyed that book.
I'm reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. I like that the intro advises the reader not to start with this book, as they will likely be confused if they haven't read The Kingkiller Chronicle books first. The illustrations are also a nice touch.
In keeping with my tradition of alternating reading fiction and non-fiction books, I just started A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian. This is the book where Boghossian coined the phrase Street Epistemology, which I had come across earlier (mainly in videos by Anthony Magnabosco) and try to use in my day to day life where appropriate.
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I do a bit of reading while I’m waiting in line each afternoon to pick up my daughter from school. Last school year, I started a book of short stories by Fritz Leiber (Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions), but put it aside to work on something else.
So now I’m going to pick it back up again. Although I’m not sure for how long. There’s a new Stephen King novel coming out next week, and it’s piqued my interest.
Just started reading >this< FREE BOOK for nerds. It's called Money something, something....
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I’m currently reading Stephen King’s Fairy Tale. I know not everyone is a fan of his writing, but I have been since I was a youngster. Less so these days, because of some of his changes in writing.
I’m about one third of the way through, and it’s just really getting into the “fantasy” part. It’s not too bad so far, even with King’s predilection for inserting snide commentary. The dedication in the beginning gives the initials of three other authors: REH, ERB, and HPL.
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It’s not so much a newer style of writing, as it is he’s much more likely to be blatant with his personal biases. Something I find annoying.
I can understand your impression of his style, however. I’ve felt that way with some of his older material as well. There are only a few of his old books I tend to reread, Salem’s Lot being the main one. I still consider that to be my second favorite vampire novel.
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My favorite vampire novel is Dracula. It’s not the best written, or the most compelling story & characters, but I’ve always seen it as bringing that legend into mass entertainment, so I’ll always be happy about that.
Pet Semetary was pretty decent. His novel It was my first over 1000 pages book, back when I was a wee lad of 14. That wasn’t too bad, but a chore to get through. Insomnia was pretty interesting. King’s got some pretty good short stories he’s done as well (Strawberry Spring, Jerusalem’s Lot, and The Boogeyman are three of my favorites). I’ve often felt an author needs to be able to write a good short story in order for him to be worth a damn.
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I’ve managed to finish all the ones I’ve started, though I sometimes wonder how. They can, at times, be tough to get through. The newest one certainly falls into that category. I’m about half-way through, but haven’t been inclined to touch it in two days.
I agree that his short stories are typically far better.
I recently acquired a couple of Blue Rose fiction anthologies for cheap in Green Ronin's warehouse sale, and am about halfway through one of them, Sovereigns of the Blue Rose. (The other is Tales from the Mount.) I've been a fan of the setting since its first iteration (True20), though I've played very little in it to date, so am enjoying these stories a great deal.
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I finally finished King’s Fairy Tale. It…..wasn’t bad. The story was fairly pedestrian, but he had some likable characters, and I’ve long thought his world-building is pretty solid.
Next up will be Frank Herbert’s The Heaven Makers. He’s one of my favorite authors, but there are still a few books of his I’ve never owned or read. Over the last few years, new prints have come out, so I’m finally getting around to completing my collection.
I just started Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. I have yet to read a work of his that I have not liked, so this one should be good.