Hmmmm....mayhap it's time to reread the Dragonlance Chronicles once again.
To anyone reading the Dragonlance Chronicles, I might recommend reading Dragons of the Dwarven Depths after Dragons of Autumn Twilight but before Dragons of Winter Night.
And in the middle of reading Dragons of Winter Night, after "Book 1" (the first 12 chapters) and "Book 2", I might recommend reading the short story "Finding the Faith" by Mary Kirchoff. You can find that short story in The Magic of Krynn (Volume 1 of Dragonlance Tales), or in Dragonlance: The Best of Tales Volume 1.
I'm going to be spending most of August trying to cram the Starfinder 2E Player Core into my brain, so I'm limiting my other reading to fluff I've read before. At the moment, that's Bulfinch's Mythology: Age of Chivalry (which is mostly devoted to the Arthurian legends), but I've barely started it.
I recently finished Green Rider, by Kristen Britain, which I enjoyed quite a bit. My wife saw me reading this fantasy classic, and she was inspired to check out the following book in that series from the library. That book is massive (unless it's large print... I'll have to check).
After that, I read The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch. It's a good twist on a time travel/alternate timeline genre, but it's also sort of a crime procedural book. The descriptions of the murders the main character investigates are pretty graphic, as are a couple of the violent attacks described, so fair warning. I could have done without, but it definitely would have changed the weight of the story. Overall, I recommend the book.
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Jade City by Fonda Lee was really interesting. Set in a very Japan-feeling nation, in a world where jade has special properties (and can only be found in that one tiny nation, or used effectively by it's inhabitants, leading to a funky sort of arms race), it's quite an involved setting, but also very cool and full of memorable characters.
It's a thick book, and the sequels, Jade Legacy and Jade War, are even weightier. I'm about a third of the way through the second, which is dense reading for me, since I can read two fluffy novels in a single night at work, while still getting all my (and two other peoples...) work done. :)
On that note, Glen Cooks Black Company books are pretty cool. I really like how the mercenary company's two relatively low-level (by setting standards) mages can get such effective use out of illusion magic. His Garrett, PI books, if Sweet Silver Blues and Bitter Gold Hearts (the two I read earlier this week) are any indication, very much light fluffy candy reading. Not really meaty enough for me.
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Finished Fonda Lee's Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy series, and wow, it's really good. Not really my traditional sci-fi or fantasy, but definitely set in a fantastic world, where a small group of people have access to something special that has defined their whole culture (and their relationship with the rest of the world).
They are thick books, and there are a lot of likable (and a few unlikable) characters in them, and the author does not seem to let a characters popularity or unpopularity determine their fate. Characterization is great, with some complexity that sometimes through me for a loop as I felt like I knew a character and then they'd do something that totally fit with their culture and upbringing, but seemed 100% antithetical to what *I* would have expected based on their previous choices, and I'd realize, oh yeah, that totally makes sense, *for them.*
I accidentally read them out of order, and thought, 'wow, there was some sort of time jump between books 1 and 2, and they keep referencing events that happened in the jump?' but no, I was reading book 3 (Jade Legacy) before book 2 (Jade War). Oops! So I went on to read Jade War last, and was like, 'Oh! This makes sense now!' and ended up reading Jade Legacy *again!* (Just to get it all in context this time. It was worth the reread two days later!)
I'm taking a brief break from Bulfinch to reread Machiavelli's The Prince.
'Afropean', by Johnny Pitts, and 'A Wizard of Earthsea', by Ursula K. LeGuin.
I'm taking a brief break from Bulfinch to reread Machiavelli's The Prince.
What do you think of The Prince? I checked it out from the library out of curiosity, because another thing I had read recently referenced it heavily. I didn't really give myself enough time to read it before it was due back, however. The passages I did read seemed interesting, but they were probably out of context.
From what I've read elsewhere, Machiavelli himself was not as ruthless as he advises the reader of The Prince to be. First, he was writing it with a powerful potential patron as his main (sole?) audience, so slanted it towards what would appeal to a De Medici.
Second, most of it is couched in terms of "this is what has worked historically, and this is what failed, and here's why." Judgments of good or morality are very utilitarian: Will this keep the people loyal to you? Will this keep you in power? And where he does outright condemn bad behavior, it's very often paired with other failings in leadership ability.
The book, while very short, provides much useful insight into Renaissance Italy and its politics. (For example, Machiavelli roundly condemns the use of mercenaries as highly unreliable tools, but almost every Italian city-state was using them at the time. In just a handful of concise paragraphs, he explains how Italy got that way.) I would consider it highly recommended reading for anyone studying that period, whether academically or just to be able to better follow literature, media, or a game using that period as a setting.
I've finished re-reading the Arthur and Mabinogion parts of Bulfinch's Age of Chivalry, and have started the (semi)-historical knights at the very end (which includes Richard I and Robin Hood, which I'm partway through now, then some other names I don't recall anything about from when I last read this ~30 years ago).
When I'm done with that, I'm going to read at least one of the giant box of Pathfinder Tales novels I just acquired before starting in on rereading The Legends of Charlemagne (technically a separate work by Bulfinch, but bundled with Age of Chivalry in my paperback edition).
I first wrote about Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson here in this post, nine years ago, as I was reading it for the second time. I commented on the book's great sense of adventure and excitement, and on how impressive a hero Jim was for managing under such difficult and dangerous conditions. (I could have sworn I wrote about the book again during my fourth reading, elaborating some point that I felt I had neglected in that earlier post, but I can't seem to find that second post now.)
As I write these words, I'm 13 pages away from finishing my sixth reading. At certain times, like when I don't have access to copies of the "Jeeves" books (about which I'll comment in my next post) or to various other forms of entertainment like games, I pick up Treasure Island and read a chapter or three of it. The book doesn't seem quite so much fun the fifth and sixth time around. I feel like Jim's crazy antics and careless thinking should have gotten him killed. Jim KNEW this. And while Jim's talent and bravery helped, a major factor that saved him was sheer dumb luck. Jim fully expected that the...
Well, the fact that I voluntarily read the book six times - nearly - speaks highly of it. But I do feel more conscious of some of its flaws.
Many times before in this thread, I commented - and raved - about the "Bertie Wooster and Jeeves" series by P G Wodehouse. For instance, there was this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, and this post, among others.
In 2016, in this thread, a conversation - this one - started me thinking about criteria for rating a novel series. Among other things, I realized that I should take the best novels of a series and pretend that those were the only ones. If a series starts going bad at a certain point, I just hold that everything after that point doesn't exist. You can read, in that conversation, how I specifically had the "Dragonlance" and "Jeeves" series' in mind when I decided upon that, although I had already started thinking that way many years earlier. (For instance, I explicitly stated it in this post.) And the more times I voluntarily read a series, the higher my "Top Ten Favorite Novel Series'" list it should rise. And so I first drafted my Top Ten list.
Since then, I've re-read many series', thus promoting them to higher positions on the list. Last year, I wrote a post - this one - in which I remarked upon my surprise that for the first time in the seven-year history of my list, I promoted a series - Dragonlance - to #1 on my list. I later posted my official list here.
And this year, lightning has struck again. As I type this, I keep glancing at the copy of The Man With Two Left Feet, a collection of early Wodehouse stories, in my lap. I checked it out of the library because it has the first Bertie Wooster story ever published, and I started reading that as soon as I finished my fifth reading of Bertie Wooster Sees It Through. Yes, I finished my FIFTH reading of the "Jeeves" series, with the pretense that only the first 33 short stories and a certain 6 of the earliest novels exist, and officially started my sixth reading, thus making it my #1 favorite novel series of all time. I mean... it's crazy! "Jeeves" isn't even of the fantasy genre! But the humor, characters and plots keep me coming back.
I would provide more specific comments on those stories, but I already linked to many of my previous posts, thus providing you with more commentary than you'll want to read, I'll wager.
Finally starting “Lucifer’s Hammer”.
First up in the cubic foot of media tie-ins: Winter Witch, by Elaine Cunningham. It has a very high-octane prologue, in which the home village of one of the two POV characters is assaulted by an army of monsters from Irrisen--just as her baby sister is being born.
I've finished Winter Witch, and have started re-reading Prince of Wolves, by Dave Gross (the very first Pathfinders Tales novel I ever read, probably over a decade ago now).
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"Vinas Solamnus" was decent. I didn't like it quite as much this time around - there were a few issues I felt could have been handled a bit better but I'm inclined to put that down as changing tastes rather than improved taste. I should reread "The Legend of Huma" and see if I like it more now.
Man, those non-Weis/Hickman Dragonlance novels were very hit or miss. I think, usually, the less lore that was established about a character the better, because an author that was given a character that didn't have much of a story had creative freedom to tell an interesting tale.
Right after finishing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel #2, The Siege by Peter David, I started #3, Bloodletter by K W Jeter. I'm over 80% through it, and I plan to finish it this week. I think that both books are surprisingly good.
In all the decades since I started watching and liking the Deep Space Nine show, why did I never even consider trying out any of the novels until last month? I don't know.
I started watching Deep Space Nine right from the beginning, in 1993. Again, I missed many episodes, and sometimes stopped watching altogether for a while, but it was fun.
Around that time, my brother married a woman who was a fan of the original Star Trek and of Deep Space Nine (but not so much of The Next Generation). She tried to make me see the virtues of the old show. She loaned me three of her old Star Trek novels that she felt were particularly good. I started reading all three, finished only one, and - once again - came to the conclusion that the original Star Trek just wasn't for me. And the movie Star Trek: Generations made me lose interest in The Next Generation as well. I even lost interest in Deep Space Nine before that show ended.
At one point, I thought that a Star Trek-like novel series might be fun to read. Hey, Star Trek: The New Frontier was written by Peter David, whose writing in the comic book field I had admired. So I asked my sister-in-law to lend me her early New Frontier books. I couldn't even finish the first one. The characters didn't interest me, and the book was slow to get the story off the ground.
And so, for many years, while my friends and relatives continued to keep up with the latest Star Trek books, I just felt no interest.
But in the late 2010s, I got nostalgic for Star Trek. And wouldn't you know it, Netflix had it! Now I had the luxury of choosing the best episodes of The Next Generation to watch. And upon finishing that, I did the same with Deep Space Nine. I wrote about it in this thread.
Over five years later - just last month, in fact - I heard something about the movie Star Trek: First Contact that intrigued me, so I watched it and liked it; I should have watched it a quarter century ago. Once again, I got nostalgic... but Netflix no longer had Star Trek. :( I began to think: maybe I should give some of those other movies like Insurrection and Nemesis a chance. And I reflected that while those movies might bring The Next Generation back for me, there are - unfortunately - no Deep Space Nine movies.
And that's when I first thought: But there are Deep Space Nine novels. Why did I never give THOSE a chance?
So I borrowed - again, from my sister-in-law - dozens of her Deep Space Nine books... though not all of them. I didn't borrow her copy of the first novel, Emissary, because it's just an adaptation of the pilot episode, which I've seen twice.
So I started with the second novel, The Siege by Peter David. Since this time he was writing about established characters in an established setting, and since this time David got the story moving, I didn't have the gripes I had with The New Frontier (that I described in the spoiler above). Some little details in the book didn't quite work, to my thinking. For instance, how did Odo know that...
I should also mention another aspect of the book, in light of what I'm about to say about the third novel. Peter David, in his preface to the book, wrote that he had seen only the first five episodes of the show - because that's all there were - before writing the novel. He mentioned the problem of "knowing full well that by the time the book comes out the characters might very well bear little resemblance to the way they're being depicted right now". Well, maybe a few scenes had a few rough edges in that respect, but for the most part, I felt he did a good job.
And now I'm over 200 pages into the third novel, Bloodletter. I know that it's not canonical, and some Amazon reviews warned me that its characters aren't written in a way true to their TV counterparts. Upon starting the book, I also felt that many details of the universe that the book is set in isn't true to the show either. I was okay with that; I could think of it as an "alternate universe" kind of story, and the familiar names of the characters and other components of the Star Trek universe could make it easy to get into.
The book has other problems, though. There's much too much friction between the characters, far more so than on the show. I think the author could easily have written the same story without all that hostility, which I find unpleasant. And the characters and technology in the book seem able to do things that I don't believe they could do, even in the Star Trek universe. Also, the writing style is a bit difficult to read. Sometimes I have to read a sentence or a paragraph multiple times to understand it. Really, why the heck does the author have to begin every scene so vaguely, generally speaking of "he" or "she", so the reader first has to scan down the scene to find out who "he" or "she" is and figure out what's going on, before re-starting the scene? It's annoying, and it serves no purpose that I can see.
But despite those problems, I'm greatly enjoying the book. It has an intriguing plot. It has the best pacing of any Star Trek book I've yet read. The Bajoran political situation is interesting, even if it doesn't quite jive with the show. And the characters make some cool accomplishments, when they're not too busy biting each other's heads off. It's amazing how many times the characters in the book come up with a solution that uses resources that the novel had already revealed, making me say "Ooh! Why didn't I think of that?!" even when I do find those resources to be implausible.
So it looks like I'll finish the book. And when I do, it will be the first time I can claim to have read TWO whole books of any Star Trek series. Considering that I'm so much fussier with books these days than I was 20+ years ago, that speaks well of those books.
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I love hearing others talk about things they enjoy and how they enjoy those things without immersing themselves in every single bit of lore about the thing. I love ST:TNG, and I love it without having watched all of the episodes. The same goes with Voyager.
Of course, as I get older, many times I've seen far more episodes of a show than I remember seeing, which is essentially the same thing. :) I say this because I may in fact have seen every episode of ST:TNG, but I've forgotten about half of them.
'The Open Philosophy and the Open Society' by Maurice Cornforth, and 'Beastslayer', by William King.