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I'm finally reading a book which I first wanted - badly - to read over 30 years ago.
Back in the twentieth 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. Terrance Dicks wrote over a third of those that I got (and still have). I liked the way Dicks stayed faithful to the original stories, providing the closest thing I could get to watching the original without actually watching TV/video. It seemed to me like only occasionally would he deviate slightly from the original script (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse).
And more than any of the other Doctor Who books, I wanted to collect novelizations of the missing stories. Many Doctor Who serials (that is, multi-episode stories, each one of which would typically have one corresponding novelization) from the 1960s were missing some of its episodes, the British Broadcasting Corporation having purged them. And my State's public TV station did not show any Doctor Who serial that was missing any episodes (with the exception of Invasion of the Dinosaurs). So the best way to find out about what happened in those stories was the novelizations. And there was just one missing story whose novelization I couldn't find at any of my local stores: The Abominable Snowmen. I tried asking and writing to people, looking for some way to order it by mail, but nothing worked out. It was especially frustrating as I read The Web of Fear multiple times; I generally avoid reading a sequel before the original.
Also, in VHS format, I got a hold of the surviving episodes of the serials I didn't see on TV. At least, I got all of those episodes I COULD get on VHS at the time. That included episode 2 of The Abominable Snowmen. But all I could get for the other 5 episodes was a brief, vague summary that didn't make for fun reading.
After about a decade, I grew tired of Doctor Who and stopped reading and watching it. About a decade after that, I grew un-tired enough to read a few of my old novelizations. By that time, I had started ordering old books through Amazon from third-party sellers. But whenever I looked for The Abominable Snowmen, I only found copies being offered for insanely high prices. I thought that maybe they were rare by that time, and I despaired of ever getting a copy.
Later, I started getting a craving to see - or read the novelization of - The Sunmakers, which was in the minority group of those Doctor Who novelizations (of the 1963-1989 series) that I had never gotten. But again, when I looked on Amazon, I found only prohibitively expensive copies.
But later still, I heard about ThriftBooks.com, from which, last year, I ordered The Sunmakers as novelized by Terrance Dicks. I figured: Great! Dicks always stays true to the original!
Well, maybe not. Granted, I haven't seen the TV serial in roughly 30 years, but as I read the book, I felt pretty sure that the dialogue had many differences between the TV serial and the book. I seem to remember more eloquent lines in the televised version. I still had fun reading it, especially because I had forgotten a lot of the plot points and action scenes. But I can't feel certain that the plot and action are exactly the same as in the original, since I know that the dialogue isn't.
This year, I finally got Dicks' novelization of The Abominable Snowmen from AbeBooks.com! Again, thank you Aberzombie for telling me about that site. I feel fortunate to get this opportunity to read it, after all these years. But while I read the part that adapts the second episode, I felt certain that the dialogue in the novel is different from the televised version, even more so than in The Sunmakers. And I also felt pretty sure that the action happened a little differently. Maybe Dicks was drawing from the original script. Maybe the director, or someone, changed the televised version to make it fit the show's limited budget. Maybe the differences in the book are a GOOD thing.
In any case, I'm glad of the chance to read it at all.
I just started So You Want To Be A Gamemaster by Justin Alexander after it was recommended by Professor Dungeon Master. It's pretty good so far, and even though I have been a GM for more than thirty years, I am still finding some good tips in there. I would recommend it to any GM, but especially to new or aspiring GMs.
I thought I might read 'Being And Nothingness' by Jean-Paul Sartre, and thereby get Bigge Braine, but it's bamboozled me thoroughly, and I've had to give up on it, choosing to read a book about ninjas instead, and 'A Voyage To Arcturus' by David Lindsey. The latter's quite something.
I would strongly recommend it.
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Re: Sword of Truth by Goodkind
Tolkien isn't the only "ripoff" (although I'd probably use "obviously inspired by, with just enough changes to avoid lawsuits") in the series (similar to Terry Brooks' early Shannara novels): The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, etc.
You may also get annoyed with his "Richard Rahl always makes the 'right' choice, even if there is no way he would know about it" deus ex machina. I also got fed up with Goodkind's apparent S&M fetish blatantly appearing in the writing (seriously, handle it like Guy Gavriel Kay instead of throwing it in our faces).
Part of the popularity may have been the resurgence of the anti-hero and part may have been from the titillation factor from the sexual content.
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I just couldn't deal with his love for Objectivism and using THAT as the basis for his books.
The other stuff wasn't great either but...yeah.
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My biggest issue with Objectivism, as commonly applied by many so-called libertarians, is that it basically reduces to Plato's Republic based on inherited wealth rather than nobility/royalty. The "reason" and "moral values" are often used as a smokescreen for The Golden Rule ("whoever holds the gold makes the rules").
Yeah well wealth and power to make rules seems like a terrible way to live...but I guess it works for them.
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Lets please be careful about IRL politics getting in ;). Your book opinions are complete fair game of course. What I read depends on my mood. Currently I think I'm working on Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Dresden Files, The Joe Ledger books, and something else im sure im forgetting.
Okay Jonathan. Sorry. But it's cool about Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I enjoyed that.
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On the positive side:
Parkinson's cover art is, as my dad sometimes says when being annoying, mad dope. Maybe that sold a few copies of the books as well.
Keith Parkinson is a fabulous artist.
I suspect that the cover ("Minions of Splugorth") and interior art pages (like the "red borg") for the RIFTS rulebook was also a major selling point back in the day ("Wow... This looks interesting!").
I agree that the Your First Adventure portion of the player's guide is pretty cool.
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Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison. I think it's a new collection of his stuff. Neil Gaiman had advertised it on the Book of the Face (he wrote the foreward), so I figured what the hell.
I've never been a big reader of Ellison, but the few things of his I'm familiar with I liked. The book is a collection of award winning stories, and (supposedly) some that were just ones Ellison liked. The two stories I've gotten through so far are pretty cool. I look forward to the rest of it.
Ah, Harlan Ellison! Although I found most of his stories that I read to be too weird for me, I take exception to a certain one of them. When I sought out a post-apocalyptic story, I couldn't find one - in prose, anyway - that I liked better than A Boy and His Dog. I read that one twice (although I never saw the movie).
And there's another story which I thought could have been written better, but I love its dramatic title: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".
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Is the Dark Tower series (of eight books) worth a read?
I watched the film recently, and while it was ok, thought that the book(s) are probably way better.
I enjoyed the series overall, though I found the 7th book (theoretically the finale of the story) to be somewhat disappointing. And the story does drag in places. I think the first book is the best. Second, for me, would be book eight.
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Back in 2016, I first drafted the Top Ten list of my favorite novel series' of all time. Since then, I revised that list many times. I added two series' to the list, disqualified another one, and merged two items on the list into one. I promoted some series' to higher spots on the list, which obviously pushed other entries further down. But in the 7 years since I first wrote the list, I've never promoted anything all the way up to the #1 spot... until 2024. The new reigning champion is Dragonlance.
Oh, there will always be a place in my heart - and several places on my bookshelves - for the former #1 listing, L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and its 13 major sequels (The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, et al). I first finished that series back in my childhood - around 1981 - and it gave me a fascination for fantasy fiction that hasn't left me since, and it led me to so many other things, including, predictably, Dungeons & Dragons in 1983.
Yet oddly, I never read any D&D novels (apart from Endless Quest books) until 1996 when I got started with Dragonlance (or DL for short). I loved the Dragonlance Chronicles and Dragonlance Legends trilogies so much, I went on to buy and read dozens more DL novels over the next four years. And when Dragons of Summer Flame broke my addiction, that freed me to re-read the Chronicles and Legends and even some second-tier Dragonlance books, including Weasel's Luck, Flint the King, The Kinslayer Wars, and others.
And when I started the Chronicles a THIRD time, my timing happened to be perfect. I finished the first novel (Dragons of Autumn Twilight) and sought to move on from there in 2006, just my local public library made Dragons of the Dwarven Depths available, so I could fit it into its proper place in continuity between the first and second Chronicles books. This was no second-tier book; it was a rare gem, worthy of the original novels! I went on to insert Dwarven Depths between books 1 and 2 in my every subsequent reading.
Of course, not everyone liked it. This conversation in 2016, in which SmiloDan disrespected that novel, made me realize something two days later. (Here's a link to those two posts in which I realized it.) When I like some early novels in a series but not later ones, it's best to pretend that those later ones simply don't exist, particularly when I judge and rate the series.
And as I wrote those posts, I started thinking seriously about writing the list of my 10 favorite novel series' of all time.
And in case you read those posts and that business with the "biscuits" makes you wonder, I should mention that I refuted that point in this post.
But getting back on track, when I had difficulty deciding how to rate the series' in my Top Ten list, I felt the need for concrete criteria, so decided: the more times I voluntarily read a series, the higher it should rank on the list. That made sense... but what about when I read two series' the same number of times? To break the tie I needed a secondary criterion. After some thought, I came up with the tiebreaking rule: when comparing two series' that I read the same number of times, the higher-ranking one should be the one I first read more recently. The theory is that the longer ago I first discovered a series, the more time I had to re-read it, so the more chance it got.
Now I'll admit that last criterion can split hairs sometimes. For instance, I first read my #9 favorite series in 1984-1985. After finishing that, I first read my #8 favorite in 1985-1986. Should that measly one year - an accident of history - really make a difference? Or for another example, my #6 listing is a great, famous classic of science fiction. My #5 favorite is science fiction, but not a classic. Does it really deserve a higher ranking? But whenever I consider such examples, I wind up deciding that the results aren't so outrageous, so I stand by them.
And there could be no question of which entry reigned supreme. In 2018, when I finished my fifth reading of the Oz series and began my SIXTH (!), even though I didn't get very far into my sixth reading (because by that time, I just knew the story too well) Oz seemed untouchable.
Or did it? I kept getting the urge to read Dragonlance, and I just couldn't get through those second- and third-rate DL novels anymore, so I kept going back to the best ones. In 2022, I finished my fifth reading of the Dragonlance Chronicles / Dragonlance Legends sextet, and thought: but Dragons of the Dwarven Depths deserves a place in that series! So then when I kept getting that craving for DL again and again, I read Dwarven Depths for a fourth and fifth time. (I mentioned that in this post last year.)
And this year, I started my SIXTH reading of Autumn Twilight! I'm not very far into it, but still, I've officially read that series six-and-a-fraction times, just as with Oz. And this isn't even splitting hairs; I've been acquainted with Oz for well over a decade longer than my Dragonlance reading!
(In my system, when comparing the number of readings, I don't compute the exact fraction; a fraction is a fraction, whether it's one thousands, or 999 thousands, or anything in between.)
Whew! I congratulate anyone who got through that long ramble about numbers. It may seem weird that I went on for so long about that without mentioning any reasons WHY I like Dragonlance. But hey, what can I say about it that I haven't said already? For instance, there's this post, this post, this post,, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, and... well, many others.
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Just finished re-reading Vincalis the Agitator by Holly Lisle. It's a prequel to The Secret Texts Trilogy (Diplomacy of Wolves, Vengeance of Dragons, and Courage of Falcons), but interesting enough on its own.
There is a lot of coverage on power, privilege, and how they can be abused even in an "enlightened" society. Mostly by how membership in society is defined and how the consequences/drawbacks of decisions by the powerful and privileged are levied.
'The Interest: How the British Establishment resisted the abolition of slavery', by Michael Taylor, which was a solid piece of work, and 'Greymantle', by John Morressey, which I didn't like much.
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I have started rereading Tim Powers's Three Days to Never. I haven't read it in over a decade, so remember very little of the story, but I've very rarely not enjoyed a Powers book.
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Just finished Lyorn, the latest Vlad Taltos book by Steven Brust.
It picks up about a day after the events in Hawk and Vlad hides out in a theater from the Left Hand. Which explains certain aspects.
More so than most of the series, this book operates on multiple levels. It jumps between character viewpoints quite often, but in an interrelated fashion.
The most absurd level (IMO) is the "scenes" from the play (sorry, musical) that the theater is rehearsing for: I'll admit I had to laugh at some of them ("I am the very model of a Fourteenth Cycle dramaturge...", "Seventy-six catapults led the big assault...", "Lethra Savode..." ["liability"]). Hence the Author's Note at the beginning, I assume ("Content warning: snark, irony, self-referential humor").
On the other levels, things are shaking out in various expected and unexpected ways. One of which was rather cosmically surprising for the effect on the setting.
Overall, worth reading if you liked the previous books. Only two more left in the series (Chreotha and The Final Contract).
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The wife and I have been rewatching Black Sails, so that put me in mind to read Treasure Island for the first time in over 35 years.
Treasure Island, the "source" of the stereotypical "pirate" (Cornwall/Devon) accent. Although that was from Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 film more than the book.
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I've finished rereading Three Days to Never. Powers has a real knack for thinking through the mechanisms and consequences of the paranormal elements that his plots hinge upon.
I'm now rereading Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things anthology. The reason I chose to reread it is a bit silly: The actress who I "cast" as one of my longest-running and most-loved RPG characters has exactly the sort of Grecian profile that Gaiman gave one of the girls at the party. The story and the actress remind me of each other frequently, but it had been a few years since I'd read it. (I have yet to see the movie based on the story, but really should.) And, of course, the rest of the book is very much worth rereading while I've got it pulled out.
'The Gladiatory Art: The Lives, Writings, and Techniques of the Eighteenth Century Stage Gladiators', by Ben Miller.