I have that book... :)
Currently reading 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth', by Jules Verne, and J.R.R. Tolkien's translations of 'Gawain and the Green Knight', 'The Pearl', and 'Orfeo'
In 2016, I was finishing up my second reading of the Conquerors trilogy by Timothy Zahn when I wrote about it in this thread. Here's a link to that post.
Later that year I began my third reading of the trilogy and wrote about it again. Here's a link to THAT post.
Once again - as in my second reading of the trilogy - I put it down - this time for YEARS - before picking it up again. I plan to finish it this weekend. I still have some gripes with that series. So many details seem to make no sense, and I believe that Zahn obfuscated those details with unnecessarily complicated-sounding babble. Well, maybe I'm wrong. I would love to get some kind of Conquerors source book in which Zahn could clarify those details; if he did, maybe I would revise my opinion and admit that the issue was with my comprehension, not with Zahn's writing. But I doubt it.
And yet, I just keep crawling back to that series! I said it before and I'll say it again: If you're looking for a military sci-fi novel series, or one with FTL travel and a variety of intelligent, space-faring races - in other words, a Star Wars-like book series - I can't think of anything I'd recommend more highly than the Conquerors trilogy.
And now I'm nearly finished with my FOURTH reading! I plan to finish it this week. I was going to write some stuff about the trilogy in this post, before realizing that - years ago - I basically already said everything I now want to say.
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Short and bitter-sweet. Quite good.
On to Edge of Infinity: the Scarred Planes, a manual of the planes for the Scarred Lands setting.
While I was not a fan of that particular book, the Scarred Lands had some great stuff. I particularly liked a bunch of the Ghelspad continent, with Hollowfaust (which is where I set the game I ran there) being a big fave (although I also liked Lokil, Shelzar, etc.).
I loved initially the idea of a whole nation of half orcs with no 'unfortunate implications' because they all had half orc mommies and daddies, but then the setting sort of added that nastiness back in with the half elven situation in Termana, so, eh.
As for my current reads, I am rereading David Brins Uplift War (last night) and Startide Rising (tonight), which are my favorite two Brin books.
I also just read C.S. Friedman's Feast of Souls a few days ago, which was good, and I'm looking forward to picking up the next two books in that trilogy (which I've ordered already). Her Coldfire trilogy was also fun, as was This Alien Shore, which I read last weekend.
A favorite line from the Coldfire trilogy.
Party in a sketchy bar
Wizard "There's blood on this menu..."
Warrior-priest "It's a rough place, wipe it off."
Wizard "No. I mean there's blood *listed* on the menu!"
Warrior-priest "Animal or human?"
Wizard "Uh, there appears to be a selection."
Another wizard (who is also a vampire) "Tastes vary."
Finished JRR Tolkien's translations of 'Gawain and the Green Knight', 'The Pearl', and 'Orfeo', and also read 'Seven Spheres' by Rufus Opus; now onto Jocelyn Godwin's translation of the 'Hypnoerotomachia Poliphili', a very peculiar book from the Renaissance about a dream journey, and still have 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' to finish.
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I'm currently reading a collection of Roman dramas, three plays each by Plautus, Terence, and Seneca.
Plautus's plots will feel familiar to anyone who's seen or read Shakespeare's comedies, because he was one of the Bard's favorite authors to plunder for plots and stock characters. (For example, "The Menaechmi" is the mold for the twins separated at birth and mistaken identity gimmicks Willy loved so much.)
I've only read the first of the Terence plays so far, but it was largely more of the same. So far, the book is Interesting because I've never read any Roman plays before, but these soap opera farces aren't my usual cup of tea.
I'm looking forward much more to Seneca's plays, which just from the titles (Medea, Oedipus, Thyestes) promise something more in the Greek tragedy vein. (I'm also partial to Medea as a character because I used her to very good effect in the Greek myth solo game I ran for my wife. Her hero quickly learned to hate and fear witches--but the truly legendary ones most of all.)
'Magus: the art of magic from Faustus to Agrippa', by Anthony Grafton, and 'The Infernal City: An Elder Scrolls novel', by Greg Keyes.
Finished Under the Dome by Stephen King and...King has a problem with endings it seems. A lot was coming together and then boom, so much for that. Perhaps it would have been better to have things split into multiple books so there would be more room to breathe.
The Tarzan stories were entertaining.
Started rereading Tanith Lee's The Birthgrave. I'm going to enjoy this one again.
If you read New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine, there was a very good mini-bio of her in their most recent issue.
I've
finished the Roman Drama anthology I posted about last time. Seneca's three tragedies (Medea, Oedipus, Thyestes) were by far my favorites, because of my interest in Greek myths. I was familiar with the first two because they're closely modeled after Aeschylus's plays, but Thyestes was new to me because (as the intro explains) there are no surviving Greek texts of that segment of the Mycenaean myths. Perhaps the most notable thing that three have in common is that nearly half the text is the central character raving about their own crimes, and the many wrongs done to them.
Since then, I've reread Sun Tzu's Art of War this past week. (I own the translation edited by James Clavell.) Musashi's Book of Five Rings lives next to it on my shelf, and I usually read these two books back-to-back whenever I revisit them, so I likely will this time, too.
I need to give some thought very soon to what book(s) to take with me on my family's vacation travels next month. Space is at a premium because we're going to a family wedding, then to Origins.
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I really enjoy Dunsany. I hope you've read "Time and the Gods", which is the best of his works I have read.
I don't have "Time and the Gods" yet. It's part of a list I keep of potential gifts, so the wife and kids always have some idea of things to get me for birthday/Christmas/Father's Day. I'm hoping it'll maybe be part of my gifts for the upcoming Father's Day.
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It could be both, and it doesn't help I came to this one straight off Tanith Lee, whose prose is anything but clumsy.
There are a few writers who I feel like are halfway between writing prose and poetry, and Tanith Lee is one of them. (Edgar Allen Poe's non-poetry fiction, for instance, can still feel pretty poetic. For a slightly more modern take, some books by Roger Zelazny, like Lord of Light and Creatures of Light & Darkness, can feel that way to me.)
I needed a book to read while traveling for a family visit followed by Origins, so when I saw The Bourne Legacy in a thrift shop, I grabbed it. I haven't seen any of the Bourne movies, but have heard them referenced often enough in a gaming context that I was curious. I'm enjoying it so far.
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Well, I finally got around to finishing The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories. I put it down for a bit to focus on some other things, but picked it back up a little while ago.
Next up is the only remaining Frank Herbert book I hadn’t owned until a few weeks ago, The Godmakers. From my understanding, the book builds upon four older, related short stories, each of which I’ve already read (though it’s been awhile).
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Today was Tade Thompson's Rosewater, and wow, was that a funky book. A look at first contact set in Lagos, Nigeria, with an unlikable protagonist that I didn't actually hate!
Had some alien stuff, some psychic stuff (kinda sorta) and a whole ton of cultural detail that I found fascinating, since I know little or nothing about the part of the world where it was set.
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The stories of WDWGFH2 were mostly good. Some of them I had read before, most were quite dated in their concepts and executions. The one I want to like the most is H Beam Piper's "Omnilingual", which focuses on xenoarchaeology and xenoarchaeolinguistics but it suffers from the aliens being way too human.
H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy was one of the first sci-fi books I read as a kid, and I really liked it (and transitioned young me into other sci-fi-of-the-day like Niven, Zelazny, etc). I've re-read it since, and it's a bit dated, but still an enjoyable read. (And really, I like reading Lovecraft and Poe, who are orders of magnitude more dated!)
Finished three more Becky Chambers books this week. A Closed and Common Orbit (set in the same universe and following her previous book, but focusing primarily on different characters, and with some surprisingly dark elements for her), To Be Read if Fortunate (quirky standalone story, not sure how I feel about it) and Record of a Spacebound Few (which I liked 80% of, but found some a bit preachy about the future society she was depicting. On the fun note, a squidgy tentacled boneless alien was the POV character, an anthropologist learning about this future human society, which was amusing, to be introduced to a human culture from the POV of an alien).
I have finished The Bourne Identity, and am eager to finally see the 2002 movie, because I'm curious about how it adapted a novel that is very grounded in its own time (1980). (Looking up those dates online, I discovered that there was a TV miniseries of the book in 1988 starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. That sounds fascinating.)
This morning I started Godsrain, by Liane Merciel, which I received as a birthday gift earlier this week. I enjoyed another novel by this author, Hellknight, and am very curious how she handles the titular cataclysm, so hope it lives up to expectations. I am enjoying the characterizations of the main characters (Kyra, Merisiel, Ezren, and Amiri) in the first few chapters I've read so far.