I'm reading this book titled "5 Practices of Orchestrating Productive Task-Based Discussions in Science". Whatever you do, do not read this book.
'Citadels of Mystery', by L. Sprague de Camp, which was a pretty sound and level-headed non-fiction book about such things as Easter Island, Nan Madol, Stonehenge, Atlantis, etc., if hopelessly out of date by now. He couldn't stop himself occasionally indulging in some very purple Sword and Sorcery prose, either.
'Citadels of Mystery', by L. Sprague de Camp, which was a pretty sound and level-headed non-fiction book about such things as Easter Island, Nan Madol, Stonehenge, Atlantis, etc., if hopelessly out of date by now. He couldn't stop himself occasionally indulging in some very purple Sword and Sorcery prose, either.
I like >it< .
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'Citadels of Mystery', by L. Sprague de Camp, which was a pretty sound and level-headed non-fiction book about such things as Easter Island, Nan Madol, Stonehenge, Atlantis, etc., if hopelessly out of date by now. He couldn't stop himself occasionally indulging in some very purple Sword and Sorcery prose, either.
I’ve got a de Camp non-fiction book called The Ancient Engineers. Found it in Half-Price Books one day. It’s cool.
'Citadels of Mystery', by L. Sprague de Camp, which was a pretty sound and level-headed non-fiction book about such things as Easter Island, Nan Madol, Stonehenge, Atlantis, etc., if hopelessly out of date by now. He couldn't stop himself occasionally indulging in some very purple Sword and Sorcery prose, either.I’ve got a de Camp non-fiction book called The Ancient Engineers. Found it in Half-Price Books one day. It’s cool.
Oh wow, >this< is cool too.
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After reading all my Pathfinder Tales books again , I decided to pick up some non-PF books by some of the authors that I liked.
So far I've only read one, Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones (author of Plague of Shadows, Beyond the Pool of Stars, Stalking the Beast, and, my favorite, Through the Gate in the Sea) and it was a fun fantastic story set in a Persia full of magic and mythical beasties. Very Arabian Knights-ish, and while I can quibble at an inclusivity/tone choice here and there that might not work for all audiences, it worked for me.
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So Desert of Souls and the sequel, The Bones of the Old Ones, were pretty good, but now I've started a new series by Howard Andrew Jones, with For the Killing of Kings, and wow, I'm really liking this one even more!
It's got more active use of magic, which I like, by the protagonists, not just as a mysterious force used by the enemy (which was the case for the former books), and a cool fantasy realm with it's own unique rules, but kept grounded enough in the central areas to 'feel accessible.'
This newer series not being set in a kind of 'fantasy Persia,' it's also a bit more to my liking with the portrayal of female characters, lack of casual mention of slavery by 'the good guys,' etc.
A friend of mine wrote a rock opera about Joan of Arc this past year, but sadly, we don't live in the same state anymore, so I wasn't able to go see it performed. However, I had that in mind when I decided to reread Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan this past week.
I am currently trying to figure out what to take with me to read on the car trip to Origins in a couple days.
The Lord of the Rings has come up in recent conversations with two of my (far less geeky) co-workers, which has made me realize I'm probably due for another re-read. So when I needed to grab something to read on the car trip to the con this morning, I chose The Hobbit. It's written in simpler language that LOTR, and it's short--perfect for light reading after a few weeks of intensive con prep.
I made it as far as Bilbo's escape from Gollum by the time we got to Columbus.
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I've started a new series by Howard Andrew Jones, with For the Killing of Kings, and wow, I'm really liking this one even more!
Finished the Ring-Sworn trilogy (For the Killing of Kings, Upon the Flight of the Queen, When the Goddess Wakes) a bit ago, and I did indeed enjoy it quite a lot. Many authors, IMO, fail to 'stick the landing' at the end of a series or trilogy, but HAJ totally delivered, and I'm gonna keep these ones, unlike those books that I read once and that's good enough for me.
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Shadows of the Empire was OK. Middle of the road for SW books.
On to James Corey's Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the series that got adapted to TV as "The Expanse".
The books really made me long for the Expanse show to go on for another couple of years, but it would have been soooo expensive!
But still, both a good book series *and* a good (if too short!) TV series, so it's kind of a win-win. Lot's of fun, compelling, complex characters.
While I'm a huge fan of Star Trek/Star Wars-ish 'high fantasy sci-fi,' I found the grittier tech level (among the Earth/Mars/Belters, anyway) to be a refreshing change of pace, and useful from a narrative standpoint, since the protagonists couldn't just beam places or use super-medicine or warp drive to skip past various challenges.
I recall reading an Otis Adelbert Kline novel at one point - very, very derivative of the John Carter stories, but competently told, so far as I remember.
I've been reading 'Icetowers' by Duncan Garry (S&S novel with a great setting), and 'Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life', by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings.
I've started A Brief History of Secret Societies, by David V. Barrett. (I've no idea when and where I acquired this book anymore, but I figured it would make a refreshing change of pace from trying to cram Remaster and Starfinder 2E Playtest books into my skull.)
To give you a general idea of my knowledge of the subject, I've read Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum at least twice, and love it despite it being one of the most challenging texts I've ever read. (It's the kind of weird campaign I *wish* I could run.) Thankfully, Barrett is significantly easier to follow, because he's aiming for a serious, balanced, and organized nonfiction overview for lay readers, not trying to weave together a fictional Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.
I've started A Brief History of Secret Societies, by David V. Barrett. (I've no idea when and where I acquired this book anymore, but I figured it would make a refreshing change of pace from trying to cram Remaster and Starfinder 2E Playtest books into my skull.)
To give you a general idea of my knowledge of the subject, I've read Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum at least twice, and love it despite it being one of the most challenging texts I've ever read. (It's the kind of weird campaign I *wish* I could run.) Thankfully, Barrett is significantly easier to follow, because he's aiming for a serious, balanced, and organized nonfiction overview for lay readers, not trying to weave together a fictional Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.
I have that one. A very well done book.
I finished 'King Kull' by R.E. Howard and over a long train journey on Monday, and boy oh boy did Lin let himself go in that one. (Should Thulsa Doom go 'Ho! Ho!'? Evidently he should, and RIP James Earl Jones)
One thing I always loved about the Dungeons and Dragons game (and by extension Pathfinder) was its great potential to tell stories. It's entertaining to read the tie-in novels, and the clear references to the game are often fun.
I mention this because a few months ago I got into the Terraforming Mars board game. One of its most fun components is the cards. Even at times when I don't have the time to play the game, I sometimes look at those cards and think about how they might - in some theoretical play of the game - interact with other cards and circumstances, what consequences would result, and what the story would be in the game world that the mechanics are reflecting. To put that another way, I wonder what kind of story might happen in this fictitious future to shape the events that the cards describe. Board games don't generally have as much story potential as role-playing games, but Terraforming Mars seems exceptional in that respect.
So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised - but I was - to learn of the existence of three Terraforming Mars novels. I often feel a craving to play the game at times when I can't, but I CAN read novels. So the urge to read one of them overwhelmed me.
So I started reading the first one, In the Shadow of Deimos. One review on Amazon said "...sometimes I did find the corporation name-dropping/references a bit distracting from the overall story at times especially when the names came up and they weren't really central to the plot." I should mention another review that said "If you are into the board game, this will certainly hold some interesting hints."
Speaking for myself, I loved those easter eggs. Many times this book references, paraphrases, and occasionally even directly quotes one of those cards. Sometimes the book drives me to dig out the game and look at a card that the novel references.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how - for the first time in decades - I got novelizations of the old Doctor Who show. Since then, I got three more. I read two of those and started my last one.
Back in the 20th century, I was a big Doctor Who fan. To this day, I've never been crazier about any other TV show. And I wasn't content only to watch; for those times when I couldn't watch TV or video, I collected over 100 novelizations of the original Doctor Who television serials and read all of those that I got. I read the vast majority of them many, many times, in fact.
One night, my local public TV station had a marathon, showing The Green Death, The Time Warrior, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Death to the Daleks, The Monster of Peladon, and Planet of the Spiders. That came to over 11 hours! I couldn't stay up that late, and I could NEVER watch that much TV in one sitting, so I taped it. In the ensuing years, I would sometimes have a craving to watch the show when it wasn't on, so I wound up watching those 6 serials on VCR many, many times (even though my having those six on video were only by accident of circumstance, not by any particular virtue of those stories). So when I bought Doctor Who books, I didn't get the novelizations of those 6. I just felt so familiar with them that it didn't seem worth it.
But years later, the VCR died, and my memory of those stories faded somewhat. Furthermore, there were some parts of the stories that were missing. I heard that The Time Warrior had a subplot about Hal the archer romancing a serving wench which was edited out due to time constraints. I heard that the subplot was preserved in the novel, and I wondered what that subplot was like and how it fit into the story. And Invasion of the Dinosaurs was missing the entire first episode, which had gotten lost from the British Broadcasting Corporation's archives! Did that episode contain something worth seeing? I didn't know.
In recent years, as I related in February, I got a couple of novelizations of other Doctor Who serials, which surprised me with their differences from the televised versions. I theorized that the novels might have been drawn from the original scripts. Maybe the director, or producer, or script editor, or someone changed the televised versions to make them fit the show's limited budget. Maybe the differences in the books are a GOOD thing.
A few months ago, I was surprised to wake up one morning feeling a craving to watch The Green Death. Well, I could have taken the DVD out of the library for free, but the novel might make for some fun reading at those times when I'm not able to watch videos.
But I felt reservations. The Green Death was novelized by Malcolm Hulke, who sometimes took liberties that I didn't like. Some of his books, such as The Cave Monsters (the novelization of Dr Who and the Silurians), The Doomsday Weapon (novelizing Colony in Space), and The Space War (novelizing Frontier in Space) added some dumb scenes, stretching out the beginning of the novel. Maybe Hulke felt that a novel should be longer to give the readers their money's worth... but then why edit out parts of the ending, when the stories were at their most exciting?! And much of the dialog was so dumb in the novels, it made me wince. Why not stick to the televised versions, which were so much better? Well, some of Hulke's other novelizations - such as The War Games and The Sea Devils - didn't make me wince... AS often.
Still, if I was going to read a novelization of one of those serials I had watched so many times, why not The Time Warrior, since I'd heard it had a subplot that had been cut out of the serial? Or how about Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which was missing the entire first episode? Mind you, Malcolm Hulke - about whom I felt those reservations I described in my previous paragraph - had novelized Invasion of the Dinosaurs as well.
Or... what the heck? Why not get all three? Thanks to Aberzombie, who had first told me about AbeBooks, I could now get those novels much more cheaply than the other reading material I've been craving.
So I got The Time Warrior, which was a little disappointing. I discovered that the serving wench bit wasn't a subplot after all, but just one scene, whose only purpose, apparently, was to give Hal a personality and background, to establish him in the audience's mind as a semi-major character. Well, at least it served THAT purpose; when I watched the serial Hal started out looking like little more than a part of the background, even though he did very important things later in the story.
Then I read Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which didn't make me wince nearly as often as I had feared it would. And since I choose to believe that the novel follows the script as Hulke - who, after all, had written both the televised story and its novelization - had originally intended it - that gave me a new perspective of the story. Some parts - like the ending - were clearly much better on the screen, with better dialog and stuff, but sometimes the novel showed us things which I'm sure the British Broadcasting Corporation didn't have the budget for. Among other things, the novel gave us many more dinosaurs, which were more active, presented greater danger, and did more damage. Even the stegosauri looked menacing, despite being herbivorous and intending no harm. One of them, for instance, unwittingly smashed walls of buildings with its tail.
So with much less hesitation I ordered The Green Death and started reading. Right at the beginning, that novel - like many other Doctor Who novelizations - could add explanations of the background that aren't feasible in video, thus giving me a better understanding of what was going on. So now, if I ever DO watch it on DVD, I may appreciate it better than I did in the past. But predictably, some parts of the book made me wince. It occurs to me that some of those badly written passages could be edited without too much difficulty, resulting in a better book. Heck, I feel like I could do an adequate job myself.
And like other Malcolm Hulke novelizations, The Green Death seems to be missing some scenes. For instance, the novel suddenly mentions that Dai Evans went into the pit. Why did he? I can't find any indication of the reason in the novel. I vaguely recall that in the televised version, Dai was upset about the Panorama Chemicals seeming to cover up Ted's death and he felt the need to get to the bottom of the matter. So I STILL feel the desire to watch the DVD after all, to see stuff like that.
My goodness! I can't believe I rambled on for this long about such short books! I wonder if anyone will even read this far. I'd better stop now.
Aaron, have you read Michael Moorcock's Dr. Who book (The Coming of the Terraphiles)?
I'm reading 'I Remember Lemuria!' by Richard S. Shaver. Possibly the pulpiest pulp that ever did pulp, with additional winsome furries, battle maids, and 50 foot high muscle mommies with six, maybe eight, arms.
No, I'm afraid that I haven't read any Doctor Who book of the last quarter-century. I'm not a fan of the new show. And the only Michael Moorcock I ever read was Elric of Melnibone which I didn't like.
EDIT: Oh, wait. Moorcock plotted the 14th and 15th issues of Conan the Barbarian, didn't he? Well, I didn't like those, either.
*loves Elric*
I finished A Brief History of Secret Societies, and followed it up with rereading Bram Stoker's Dracula. I've always loved this novel (one of the very few Victorian novels I can say that about!) and I hadn't read it in some years. It's still good, but my more cynical side raises an eyebrow at the perfect, un-jealous chivalry of the male protagonists in their mutual worship of Lucy (three suitors at once, and no hard feelings at all among them? a miracle!) and later Mina.
The plot of a recent RPG session I played was heavily influenced by Dan Brown's Robert Langdon novels, so I've decided to re-read them (and eventually track down and read the fifth book in the series, which I didn't even know existed until last week). I started Angels & Demons yesterday, and keep finding little details that amuse me on a very personal level, such as:
* Langdon is immediately whisked off to CERN, which he knows nothing about. The book was released while I was working as office staff for a university physics department which included several faculty affiliated with CERN. I didn't read the book until a couple years after leaving that job, so never got to ask any of those profs if they'd ever read Angels & Demons, and if so, what they thought about it. (I'd guess that any who did either hated it, or found it a guilty pleasure--if not both.)
* About 100 pages in, Brown name-drops Steve Jackson Games, because his villain is the Illuminati. At the time I read the book, I owned the INWO CCG, GURPS Illuminati, and Kenneth Hite's Suppressed Transmissions collections (reprinted from Pyramid Magazine), I still own all of them but INWO.
I've finished Angels & Demons, and started The Da Vinci Code.
I've also established that my local library system has Origins, Brown's fifth Langdon novel, so I'll be borrowing that when I get that far.
Finished The Da Vinci Code, started The Lost Symbol.
Or, as some might view it, we're picked on the Church for two books now, let's rag on the Masons this time. ;)
'Things Fall Apart', by Chinua Achebe (really good), and 'She', by H. Rider Haggard.