And this morning, I recalled that my wife bought me a (very) early birthday present, Tim Pratt's Starfinder 2E novel, Era of the Eclipse. I was going to save it for my birthday, but decided that it sounds like pretty much exactly the kind of thing that I want to read now, before diving back into more Sanderson.
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And this morning, I recalled that my wife bought me a (very) early birthday present, Tim Pratt's Starfinder 2E novel, Era of the Eclipse. I was going to save it for my birthday, but decided that it sounds like pretty much exactly the kind of thing that I want to read now, before diving back into more Sanderson.
I found it a very fun novel. Also a good introduction to the Starfinder universe
Still reading 'The Chronicles of Malus Darkblade', by Dan Abnett and Mike Lee. Actively hoping that the protagonist loses in as gruesome and permanent a way as Dark Elf society can come up with, while knowing that I'm going to be disappointed. Lots of very good fight scenes, though.
Also finished 'The Occult History of Bolshevism' by Stephen Flowers, which I didn't think much of. Replaced it with 'A History of Magic', by Chris Gosden. Very good so far.
I read Era of the Eclipse, and enjoyed it--as I expected to, having read one of Pratt's Pathfinder Tales. His characterization of Dae and Chk Chk in the frame story felt spot-on, as did Zo!'s cameo in both the frame story and the main story. The latter is an account of life on Absalom Station immediately after the Gap ended, and serves as an excellent introduction to that mysterious bit of history. And, as the title hints, we get to see evidence of why Hellknights seem to be even worse people in Starfinder than they were in Pathfinder. (Or at least in PF 1E, where it was possible to play a Hellknight who wasn't a total fascist bastard. PF 2E and SF, not so much, IMO.)
I have started Called to Darkness, by Richard Lee Byers. It's set in (and below) the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, a region of Golarion that I'm less familiar with than most.
'How to fence', by Aaron A. Warford. Some decidedly weird thrusts in there.
For years, I've been seeking out novels told from a nonhuman point of view. And by "nonhuman" I don't mean anthropomorphic animals communicating with each other in complex sentences. I mean actual animals behaving as animals do. I feel that few books manage to get that approach right. One particularly famous one is A Dog's Purpose by W Bruce Campbell. I read that book, and started two others by the same author. I don't often find such a book that I find good enough to finish. And books from the perspectives of animals other than dogs are REALLY rare. The only such book I found about aquatic animals was A Whale of the Wild by Rosanne Parry, which I couldn't finish.
Hmm. Did I say "the ONLY such book"? In recent weeks, I happened across another. And I kid you not; the book is called A Dog's Porpoise by M C Ross. Yes. This book switches between the point of view of three characters: one young girl, one dog, and one porpoise. Since the title makes it clear that the book is trying to capitalize on the success of A Dog's Purpose, I didn't expect it to be very good...
...so I got a few pleasant surprises. It's cool to see the same events happen from points of view very different from each other. When we see from the porpoise's perspective, the author manages to convey a truly alien mind-set; this guy and its fellow porpoises are not remotely human. Even when they communicate with each other, I have no trouble believing that their messages are conveyed in clicks, whistles, body-language, and the like, not in complex sentences.
The dog's point of view is convincing too, at first. But then, starting about 100 pages into the book, he seems able to understand English far better than any dog possibly could.
What's even less plausible is that the townspeople seem to have nothing better to do with their time than get involved in the story. A porpoise shows up, and everyone in town meets to discuss it. A woman invites everyone to her house for some surprise event that she doesn't explain, and everyone shows up. And when they come and find that she's selling art, a lot of people buy it right then and there; apparently they have nothing better to do with their money either. The young girl calls for a town meeting without explaining what it's about, and again, everyone just shows up. And at that meeting, they all agree to cancel all their plans to get together one day to save the porpoise. They seem not like real people in a real town, but like a plot device created for the purpose of making the story happen. (I said much the same thing about the Shannara books in this post two months ago.)
Well, I guess the book doesn't need VERY much verisimilitude; it was written for children. The back cover advertises it for the 5th-grade reading level. I suppose I would have liked the book a lot better at that age. Even as it is, I'm over 200 pages in and I haven't given up on it. What with my short attention span these days, that sets it above books like Lad, a Dog; Mr Revere and I; The Incredible Journey; Wolf Brother; The Bees; A Dog's Chance; Hollow Kingdom; Stella; Good Dog... well, you get the idea.
In fact, I'd call A Dog's Porpoise the best animal novel since A Dog's Purpose.
Back in 2014, in this thread, I mentioned Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume. Here's a link to that post, in which I described my view that some readers - including some who liked the book - missed the point the whole story.
This year, at the library, I noticed a movie adaptation of that book on DVD. I had never known that movie existed. I guess I missed the thread...
Are you there god? It's me, Margaret.
Yeah. The book came out in 1970, the movie in 2023. My first reaction was: what took so long? But actually, I don't think a movie could have gotten away with some of those scenes in the 70s. Even in 2023, the moviemakers had some doubts.
My second reaction was: did the moviemakers also miss the point of the book, or would this true to the original? I recently finished watching the DVD, and yes, it is VERY true to the original! As I watched, I thought at first that some scenes didn't make certain points as clearly as the book had done, but those points were there. And as I continued to watch, some of the scenes - though somewhat different from the book - presented the same points in amazing ways! One scene was the funniest in the movie because the movie presented that scene in a way no book possibly could. If you see the movie, I imagine you'll know which scene I mean.
And for people like me, familiar with the book, the movie provides some surprises. Things happen differently from the book, but in ways that present the same themes. And yes, the moviemakers absolutely understood the point of the whole story.
After I finished the movie itself, I watched the bonus materials on the DVD, which showed - among other things - Judy Blume's direct involvement in the making of the movie.
Yeah. HALF A CENTURY LATER. It's amazing.
Oh, I also mentioned the book in this other thread.
Finished two books - 'Pharsalia: Episodes from the Civil War' by Lucan (very overwrought prose, which put me off, and translated by Robert Graves, who couldn't resist inserting his own particular take on Roman mythology into it) - and 'Elak of Atlantis' by Henry Kuttner, which was bloody great. Have moved onto 'Infernal Sorceress' by Gary Gygax, and also intend to read 'Culpeper's Herbal' shortly.
I'm currently reading Game Over by M C Ross.
I'm generally not a fan of virtual reality stories like The Matrix. The very concept of a brain interfacing with a computer - so directly that the computer can project a complete, realistic illusion - strains my credulity so much - even for science fiction - that it can be hard for me to accept many more premises that a story needs. One such premise that I particularly dislike is the whole "if you die in the Virtual Reality environment then you die in real life" cliche.
(Well, I'm a fan of the old Doctor Who show, which used virtual reality in some stories like The Deadly Assassin, Nightmare of Eden), and The Ultimate Foe, but I'm not counting those, and won't discuss them in this post.)
About twenty years ago, I heard a blurb pitching the novel Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde. In the beginning of the description, I thought I could never be interested. By the end of the advertisement, I was saying "Whoa!" The book's protagonist played a virtual reality game with a high fantasy setting, the description of which intrigued me. So I read the book. Gone was the "if you die in VR then you die in real life" nonsense. Instead, the book created tension by having a mob damage the machine, so that the protagonist had to finish the game in order to disconnect safely.
And the book was just plain fun to read. In this other thread I mentioned that I was almost finished with my fourth reading. Since then, I read it a fifth time, and almost finished my sixth reading... but then I couldn't finish, as I was too familiar with the story.
But I felt the need for more, so I did some searching. Vande Velde wrote two other "virtual reality" novels, User Unfriendly and Deadly Pink, but I couldn't finish either of those. I tried Ready Player One, Otherworld, and The Eye of Minds, but didn't get far in any of those. I gave up, without figuring out what those books were missing.
A week ago, just a few posts up, I mentioned reading a book by M C Ross. After I finished that book, I browsed my local library's catalog looking for other books by the same author. When I saw Game Over, I thought "Meh. Another Virtual Reality novel is no big deal." But again, a description of the book's premise caught me by surprise: everyone and his brother are addicted to this virtual reality environment, called HIVE, and one day, an upgrade brings a software glitch that traps everyone in there. It's up to the heroine - who hates HIVE although she refuses to admit it and games on it herself - to fix the problem.
Whoa! You know, as a software engineer, I long ago grew leery of upgrades, which often made my software - and my company's software - fail. And yet we're all expected to get the latest upgrade. Many people are happy and excited to do so, even if they know nothing about the latest upgrade or what it does. Nobody seems to think "Wait, what if the latest upgrade has bugs, which keep our devices from doing what we need them to do?" I wished for a story where an upgrade causes trouble.
And I hate smartphones. I hate the interfaces for them. But everyone and his brother seems thoroughly hooked on using them. When I see people busy on their phones, when they should be focusing on the other things they're doing - like watching their surroundings while they're crossing a street or parking lot - I feel that phone usage has gone too far. And so many people expect all of us to use our phones to do everything, so that in many places, we can't - as an example - make an appointment without one. This Game Over novel sounds like just the kind of commentary I'd been looking for!
Now I realize what those other VR books were missing: an intriguing hook.
So I started reading. As I did, I found some cool twists. For instance, no one knows what exactly caused the software glitch. Maybe it wasn't a glitch; maybe someone deliberately hacked into HIVE and sabotaged it. Cool!
The plot has its flaws, like astronomically unlikely coincidences. Several characters actually point that out. And if so many people neglect their real-world lives, including their jobs, as much as the book emphasizes that they do, to spend too much time in the HIVE, how is it that people grow and produce food, and maintain houses, streets, and places of business in the real world? The author doesn't seem to worry much about verisimilitude. I wrote that - back in that earlier post - about the other M C Ross book I read. And the further I get into the book, the more parts of it I see that don't make sense, particularly in the heroine's solutions to the challenges she faces. One line actually comments on one such solution: "It made no sense; it made perfect sense". Really.
Still, Game Over has kept me entertained so far. I'm over 200 pages into it. That's already further in - and therefore marks it as better - than any of those other VR books I mentioned, other than Heir Apparent.
I finished Called to Darkness and read Tim Pratt's Liar's Blade.
I've just started the second book of the Mistborn Trilogy, Well of Ascension.
Currently reading Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer. This is the source of much of what people 'knew' about witches way back when. Esoterica has a wonderful video on the book. The edition I have is (or claims to be) the Rev. Summers translation, but it is without any introduction or foot/end notes or any critical information to help understand the contents. There are also a number of minor spelling errors which makes me worry if there are translation errors that won't be apparent.
Either way, it's a fascinating read, though it makes me feel bad for not having read every source it quotes and cites. The bit about witches making penises disappear is the most entertaining bit so far.
Summers was a decidedly weird character. (Among other things, he claimed that Surrealism was a Communist conspiracy, at one point.) I think Robertson Davies (maybe?) talked about the delicious, "rich fruitcakey-ness" of his prose. Anyway, it's been a while since I've thought about the Malleus, but IIRC, one of Summers' shortcomings is that he rather swallows the mythology hook, line, and sinker, and doesn't, for example, translate carefully to bring out the Latin genders. Compared to the connotations that have accrued around "witches" in English, malefici (masc.), to give the devil (Kramer) his due, does add a bit of nuance to his paranoia about what women get up to. (I have never absconded with any gentlemen's parts. I'm not that sort of witch and heretic. ;) )
I'm not sure if there's a more recent, more critical edition than Mackay's, but that was big when I read it. In two volumes, with the translation in the second, and in a separate paperback printing to make it more accessible for folks who don't want to deal with the Latin.
Currently between books at the moment, mostly. Speaking of largely outdated texts, I do still have to get through the latter half of Solomon's Noonday Demon about depression, and I should pick up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell again soon. I should be good and avoid bookstores when I do the shops this afternoon, but we'll see how that goes.
Currently reading Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer. This is the source of much of what people 'knew' about witches way back when. Esoterica has a wonderful video on the book. The edition I have is (or claims to be) the Rev. Summers translation, but it is without any introduction or foot/end notes or any critical information to help understand the contents. There are also a number of minor spelling errors which makes me worry if there are translation errors that won't be apparent.
Either way, it's a fascinating read, though it makes me feel bad for not having read every source it quotes and cites. The bit about witches making penises disappear is the most entertaining bit so far.
Wait until you get to the jokes!
I haven't said anything about Star Trek on these boards in months and months.
In the past, on this thread, I related borrowing dozens of Deep Space Nine novels from my sister-in-law. I described some of them, such as #2 (The Siege), #3 (Bloodletter), and #6 (Betrayal) as entertaining. But there were others, specifically #4 (The Big Game) and #5 (Fallen Heroes) which had some good ideas, but which I found too slow to keep my interest. I couldn't get halfway through those.
After I finished number 6, I noted that I hadn't found numbers 7 and 8 in my sister-in-law's collection. Maybe she never had them, or maybe they got lost over the years. I had grown tired of Star Trek anyway, so I didn't touch the Deep Space Nine books for a long time.
One day, my thoughts turned to the Conquerors trilogy by Timothy Zahn - Conquerors' Pride, Conquerors' Heritage and Conquerors' Legacy. It's #4 on the list of my 10 favorite novel series' of all time. One problem, though, is that I already read those 3 books 4 times each. I know the story too well, and it can get tiresome slogging through the same story again just to pick up a few details that I hadn't noticed or didn't remember from before.
Well, if I want a military space opera, why not try another Deep Space Nine novel? So I picked up #9, Proud Helios by Melissa Scott. The obvious question was: Would I find the book entertaining, or too slow?
The answer is: both. Or to put that another way, the answer is: somewhere in between.
It's a funny coincidence that I picked this book as an alternative to Conquerors' Pride. Proud Helios began in much the same way, except that Conquerors' Pride started with a bang in its first, 16-page chapter. Proud Helios took about three times that many pages to tell the same amount of story. Many of those pages were filled with the characters talking about how they felt about the situation.
The book went on in much the same manner, padded with repetition and redundant passages. And I didn't find the characters - outside of the regular ones we know from the show - to be interesting. I got bored and put the book down.
But weeks later, when I felt inclined to read a bit of Star Trek again, rather than start the next Deep Space Nine book, I decided to pick up Proud Helios from where I had left off. I read some of it, put it down again, and later picked it up again. Now I'm over 90% through it.
I've finished Well of Aacension, which can largely be summed up by, "Okay, so you've overthrown the god-king. Good luck holding onto what you've won." That's a gross oversimplification, of course, but is definitely the main theme, as Sanderson takes a hard look at the consequences of the first book's victory on his characters.
Before I move on to the last book in the trilogy, I've started another Pathfinder Tales novel, Pirate's Honor, by Chris A. Jackson.
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'The Fall of the House of Usher, and other tales', by Edgar Allen Poe, and 'The English Physician Enlarged', by Nicholas Culpeper.
Read the short story All You Zombies and checked out the movie versions Pre-Destination
Man. Talk about a brain bending and depressing story. I was actually imagining how it might work as a cross-over with Final Destination
I've finished Pirate's Honor, and enjoyed it. The lunar naga Celeste is, of course, the most compelling character in the book. The captain whose honor the title references? Eh, much less so, but he's necessary for the plot, and he's far from unlikeable.
I'm still trying to decide whether to read the next Pathfinder Tales novel (Ed Greenwood's Wizard's Mask), start Sanderson's third Mistborn book, or find something else to read (or reread) instead.
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'Craftland' (a book about old handicrafts, and the UK regions that specialised in them, and the people who are keeping them alive), by James Fox. My Dad asked for his birthday, and I thought it sounded interesting, so I got it out of the library. Glad I did.
For fiction, a compilation of short sword & sorcery stories put together by the Rogues In The House podcast.
'Britain AD', by Francis Pryor, a book about the late and post-Roman period, whose basic conclusion is that there was no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon invasion . This makes a good deal of sense to me, and he presents his case very well.
Also, 'Swords Against Darkness II' A pretty good collection of S&S stories overall, the Ramsay Campbell one standing out in particular.
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'Britain AD', by Francis Pryor, a book about the late and post-Roman period, whose basic conclusion is that there was no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon invasion . This makes a good deal of sense to me, and he presents his case very well.
Uh, could you expand on this a little? Is he claiming that the Angles and Saxons didn't come or that it wasn't really an invasion? The former seems completely nonsensical to me so I'm guessing the latter but there are lots of books spouting absolute nonsense so I thought that I'd check.
Edit: Never mind. Checked reviews and answered my own question :-).
I have read Wizard's Mask, and found it a bit lacking compared to some of the previous Pathfinder Tales, though I'm not sure if I can articulate why.
I started Dave Gross's King of Chaos on my lunch break today. Another Varian Jaggare and Radovan adventure, this time set in the Worldwound at the time of the Wrath of the Righteous AP. I have not played or read that AP, so only know the barest bones of what happens during it. I'm hoping this novel will give me more context about those events.
On to Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, the first book of Malazan Book of the Fallen. A few months ago I watched a video about the series and it piqued my interest, so I bought the first two books. About 100 pages in and I'm quite enjoying it. It does not ease you into things, introducing characters and places and concepts without much context, and there is an element of being thrown into the deep end to sink or swim which I'm enjoying. It remains to be seen if the rest of the book, and series, lives up to its quite favorable first impression.
I'm excited for you, as I loved this series. I say this as someone who actually didn't like major parts of how the series ends, but I thought that the various characters and the schemes they get up to were so much fun to read.
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I just finished Operation Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman. It's a sci-fi story about planetary colonists who are suddenly invaded by people from Earth. Earth is using mechs controlled by gamers who are piloting the mechs remotely after paying for the privilege as a sort of game. My friend recommended the book to me, probably because he found it hilarious, but I found parts of the story too dystopian and sad to enjoy a lot of the humor. Still, I enjoyed the book overall. It discusses the fears humanity has with AI (analogous to Skynet or The Matrix instead of, say, ChatGPT), and it has a lot of very touching moments related to family.
I've never read a book under such strange conditions before.
Back in 1984-5 I first read an - almost - unabridged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. That translation was into English that was antiquated and stilted even when that edition was first published in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novel. The main character was rich, powerful, and manipulative, and he appealed to readers who wished they could be also. And the book interwove a dozen fascinating subplots, cleverly and with charm.
Over a decade later, I wanted to read The Count of Monte Cristo a second time, but I could only find abridged editions in the bookstores. I tried a couple of those, figuring that the novel had so much excess that could be cut out. But the abridged editions omitted too much. They left out stuff that made some of the secondary characters and their subplots interesting.
Right about then, I saw the Robin Buss translation, published by Penguin Classics, hit the bookstores. That edition had an introduction that mentioned a few brief passages that even the "unabridged" versions censored. Anyway, I enjoyed reading that Buss translation into plain, easy-to-read English. I read that edition twice. And the way I see it, that means I read the book three times; I don't count the abridged versions, but I do count the old edition, despite its censorship.
And because of the book's great length, I classify it as a series, rather than as a single novel. And with that consideration in mind, I rank it at #9 in the list of my favorite novel series' of all time.
But when I started my fourth reading - that is, my third reading of the Buss translation - I found the excessive length too much for me. I quit about a third of the way through the book.
Later, I would sometimes find myself in a situation where I had nothing to do, but needed to look busy, in a setting where being seen reading a book might be indiscreet, and I should instead appear to be working on a computer. Such things happened seldom. And when they did happen, they typically didn't last very long. But they did occasionally, briefly happen. So I thought I would download a book from Project Gutenberg and read that in such situations. I chose The Count of Monte Cristo. I only found antiquated translations there, so I read one of those, picking up from where I had left off in the Buss translation. So my fourth reading is a bastardized hybrid of two different kinds of translation that weren't meant to go together. That's what I meant by "strange conditions". Nevertheless, I've been enjoying the book, and I'm now over three quarters through it.
I have finished King of Chaos. It holds up well against Gross's previous Varian and Radovan books, and like them, adds some interesting twists to the duo's personal journeys (Varian's magic and Radovan's fiendish heritage). This novel also introduces a third POV character, as they reunite with a character from Queen of Thorns.
Next, I have decided to switch gears and finish Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, so I started The Hero of Ages tonight.
A translation of the 'Iliad' (can't remember who by, but it's a Penguin Classics version from relatively recent times), and the second in the 'A Book of Blades' series of Sword & Sorcery short stories
My all-time favorite Dungeons & Dragons novel is an Eberron book called Voyage of the Mourning Dawn by Rich Wulf. I won't bother describing it here, as I've already done so. For instance, I mentioned it in this post. I described some details in three posts in another thread. In this very thread, I described some of the coolest aspects of the book, during my fourth reading of it. Here's a link to that post. In the 12 years since then, I finished my fourth, fifth and sixth reading.
But when I started my seventh reading, I tired of the story and put the book down. That's hardly surprising; I've read few books in their entirety that many times. My reading a novel 7 times is one of the qualifications for listing it among my favorite novels of all time.
I haven't been reading much in the way of novels during the past 2 months, often choosing instead to read comics or play games. But I often carry around a pocket-size book for situations when I have to wait (in the checkout aisle at a supermarket, for instance). And 2 months ago, I chose Voyage of the Mourning Dawn as my "pocket" book. So now and then, I have occasion to pick it up from where I left off and advance a few pages.
Today - as I advanced a few pages - I felt surprised to realize that I'm over 90% through it. It's very possible I'll finish it during a trip next week. And if I do, Voyage of the Mourning Dawn will become the sixth novel to join the list of my favorites. It will be the first D&D novel to do so.
I've gotten into audio books in the past year or so, especially when I'm driving to work. It's a nice alternative to listening to the depressing and sensational news cycle or the same ten songs of the week on the radio.
I was on the GitP forums reading a class guide for Pathfinder, and the author of the guide I was reading had a link to his series of urban fantasy books called the Alex Verus series. I checked out the first audiobook from the library and ended up listening to the entire 12-book series.
Alex Verus is the main character of the eponymous series by Benedict Jacka, and it's a very Harry Dresden-esque. In fact, Jim Butcher, the author of the Dresden Files, wrote a cover blurb promoting one of the Alex Verus books. If you like The Dresden Files, you'll probably like Alex Verus; if you don't, you probably won't. Harry Dresden was obviously a heavy influence, but there are a few key differences.
First, the mages in the Alex Verus books have magic that's more focused than the more generalist mages in The Dresden Files. You have ice mages, time mages, life mages, etc. This means that all of a mage's particular spells are based on their magic type. Ice mages can't burn or control earth, but they can create ice structures and freeze things. Time mages can slow down or speed up time in a localized area and even see back in time, but they can't do much in terms of combat.
Alex Verus is a diviner, and divination in this series is pretty interesting. A diviner can see all of his or her possible futures, mentally following each one for a few minutes at a time. They can isolate potential futures where a certain event happens, and then study those futures to figure out what they need to do to make their present lead to that future.
Another big difference is that while The Dresden Files has all sorts of supernatural creatures and magic organizations (paladins, vampires, faerie courts, etc.), the Alex Verus books primarily focus on Alex Verus' interactions with the mage society in London. There are some magical creatures, but they are not nearly as prevalent, and all non-mundane humans are some type of mage. Most of the overarching story is about Alex Verus dealing with mage society and getting involved with rogue mages trying to kill him. The story shows how he grows in influence and power in order to survive.
The feel is different than The Dresden Files, too. I don't want to use the word "dark," but the author is much more willing to let the main character kill other characters when it serves the plot. Alex Verus doesn't enjoy it, but he's placed in many kill or be killed situations, and he doesn't have a lot of unnecessary angst about his actions.
Overall I recommend checking the series out to anyone who also likes urban fantasy stories, especially The Dresden Files.