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.