I just finished City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett.
I'm about to start Conspiracy of Ravens by Lila Bowen, which I'm really eager to start because its sequel ended with the protagonist literally hanging on a cliff.
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Indeed, and you can do so for free, with the blessing of his estate.
Thanks!
With a great sigh of relief I put The Cloud Roads (Books Of Raksura #1, Martha Wells) behind me and jumped straight back to Vardia with Ace Of Skulls (Tales Of The Ketty Jay #4). Excited and somewhat fearful to finish this series, which has been following me around for the past four years.
Ugh. One of the worst reads I've put myself through in a long while, and the first part of a five book series too.
Before I start with my actual thoughts about the book, though, I have some musings about a subgenre of SFF for which I struggle to find a name. This subgenre is characterized by, of all things, shapeshifting and romance. It seems as if the Twilight books created a whole new set of tropes and conventions, just like A Song Of Ice And Fire birthed the modern Grimdark movement (in a way). I don't know what it is about those two things that really really appeal to some people, but this whole book and many others like it revolves around getting those two elements to work together. Either way I have nothing against the concept, I'm mostly just trying to understand how and why those things seem to jive so well with some readers.
So, "The Cloud Roads". I do wish to start with the more positive outlook I can manage here: the setting of The Books Of Raksura is original, interesting and fun. A world populated by hundreds or perhaps thousands of humanoid species, living as primitive clans among the ruins of lost civilizations that appear far more advanced (still nothing remotely modern or science fictional - medieval technology is about where the lost civilizations stopped). The various races and locations were great.
Pretty much everything else sucked.
The writing was as flat as they come - no voice, no prose, barely any flow - just words on a page, conveying information in a decently tidy manner. The characters acted mostly like a bunch of millenials who just happen to look like shape shifting mini dragons, the action scenes lacked any sort of excitement and suspense, and dialog was uninteresting. The story, when you get pass the trappings of the unique setting, was trite and predictable and ultimately weightless. Essentially, the main character is an orphan who grew up away from his race. This made him reclusive and strange, yet once he gets in contact with his people, the entire lives of everyone in their society begins revolving around him. Each character either immediately likes and accepts him or hates him for no reason, which makes his full acceptance into his tribe at the end of the book not the least bit exciting or impactful.
I strongly recommend skipping this one. This is a depressingly standard fantasy with very little to distinguish it from thousands of other books out there. There simply are better things you could do with your time.
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I just finished John Fogerty's autobiography "Fortunate Son." It was a surprisingly good read, with lots of commentary on music and the contractual issues that worked against Fogerty and CCR. Saul Zaentz was an evil, evil man.
Just finished Through Stone and Sea in the Noble Dead series by Barb & J.C. Hendee.
Now readingCourage in a Dangerous World, Eleanor Roosevelt's political writings.
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Saul Zaentz was an evil, evil man.
You've just won understatement of the week.
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Taking a break from the pulps to read some more recent Mythos literature.
Most recently, this was the Paula Guran edited Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction.
This is a great anthology of new stories, by most of the major recent cosmic horror authors. Although Cthulhu is in the title, very few of the stories are linked directly to the mythos. Rather, to often excellent effect, they deal with cosmic horror themes and other elements Lovecraft worked with.
Stories that I especially enjoyed included
Laird Barron's "A clutch". This story mostly stands out in that rather than straight up horror, this story is set in a secondary fantasy world, something I have not seen this particular author dabble in, and which also makes my incredibly interested to see what exactly Barron could do with an epic fantasy novel
"It's All the Same Road in the End" by Brian Hodge. While some of the authors have names that stand out from past readings, Hodge is a new one for me that I will have to pay closer attention in the future. This is a great creepy as hell story about a pair of brothers investigation the 60 year old disappearance of there grandfather in Kansas. It's always nice to see cosmic horror move out beyond New England, and Hodge does a good job of making the open prairies of the Central US into eery terrain
"In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro" by Usman Malik adds a cosmic horror twist to ancient Indian history, as a female Muslim teacher and her students get stranded in some ruins over night. Again...creepy and full of wtfery, without really using any of the typical lovecraft cliches and benefiting from a very novel narrator.
Those were three that stood out as especially awesome in this anthology. Like any anthology though, there were a few misses that were not that great. Most confusingly, there were a couple of stories that really really did not fit the theme of the anthology. "A Cthulhu Navy wife" seems to be just a story about the struggles of being an old time military wife, with random Mythos names thrown in, in such a manner that doesn't make sense and feels more like mad libs. "Falcon-and-Sparrows" is neither horror, nor mythos, and while not a bad story, seems like it would be far better in a fantasy anthology. "Variations of Lovecraftian Themes" isn't even a story, but rather a quasi biography of H.P. Lovecraft with some Holocaust history thrown in.
Overall worth checking out, but not nearly as solid as it could be.
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Taking a break from the pulps to read some more recent Mythos literature.
Most recently, this was the Paula Guran edited Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction.
This is a great anthology of new stories, by most of the major recent cosmic horror authors. Although Cthulhu is in the title, very few of the stories are linked directly to the mythos. Rather, to often excellent effect, they deal with cosmic horror themes and other elements Lovecraft worked with.
** spoiler omitted **...
The "Mohenjo-Daro" one looks really interesting. Last time I read anything about that city was in "Sailing to Byzantium" by Robert Silverberg, which is one of my favorite sci-fi short stories. If it is anything like that, it should be excellent.
The "Mohenjo-Daro" one looks really interesting. Last time I read anything about that city was in "Sailing to Byzantium" by Robert Silverberg, which is one of my favorite sci-fi short stories. If it is anything like that, it should be excellent.Taking a break from the pulps to read some more recent Mythos literature.
Most recently, this was the Paula Guran edited Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction.
This is a great anthology of new stories, by most of the major recent cosmic horror authors. Although Cthulhu is in the title, very few of the stories are linked directly to the mythos. Rather, to often excellent effect, they deal with cosmic horror themes and other elements Lovecraft worked with.
** spoiler omitted **...
Having only just now skimmed an outline of that story...these two are very very very different. Mohenjo-Daro is cosmic horror with the emphasis on the HORROR, and has some messed up imagery I suspect would be lacking in that Silverberg story
OMG! OMG!! OMG!!!
In Lila Bowen's A Conspiracy of Ravens, on page 100, she used the term big damn heroes!!!
***Browncoat Nerd***
Finally got around to reading The Peripheral by William Gibson. At first my loyalties were divided between the impoverished cyber-rural badasses and the posthuman urban aesthetes, but once they teamed up I felt much less compromised. I need me a plate of nubbins from Hefty!
Didn't realize there was a 2014 Gibson novel, just looked up the Hubertus Bigend trilogy and realized the last one came out seven years ago and suddenly felt the inexorable creeping of age.
[Shudders]
Due to lots of commie activity, had to restart from the beginning on The Peasant War in Germany (which I am getting bogged down in, geographically. "Upper Suabia"? "Thuringia"? Wish the book had a map like a fantasy epic) and Boy, Snow, Bird.
Don't have to re-start the Brigadier Gerard book. Huzzah! and all thanks to short stories!
"Upper Suabia"? "Thuringia"? Wish the book had a map like a fantasy epic)
Swabia was in SW Germany, like around Augsburg; I think it was a medieval duchy in the Frankish Empire or something like that (my history is a little hazy).
Thuringia is in central Germany, around Weimer. They have a lot of outdoors-y stuff there and a distinctive type of sausage with marjoram and some other spices (I usually serve them alongside more traditional Bratwurst, Weisswurst, and Knackwust when I host an Oktoberfest party).
Isn't it pronounced Swassia, though? I only know that because I spent a whole lot of time wondering why everyone in Doona Barr's comic The Desert Peach kept saying "Shibe" all the time before I understood the German alphabet stuff. Look, whatever, her lettering is flowery at the best of times, it just looked like there was a capital B in the middle of the word, okay?!
I just finished reading Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey.
It is exactly what it sounds like - the story of The Tempest from the POV of Miranda (and her somewhat awkward secret romance with Caliban).
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I'm still pretty sure Thuringia does show up in some old S&S. Some Conan rip-off. Maybe one of the ones someone else finished? Or maybe one of Lin Carter's.
Thongor of Lemuria.
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Look, whatever, her lettering is flowery at the best of times, it just looked like there was a capital B in the middle of the word, okay?!
When I was in high school we hosted a German exchange student, with the goal that the next year I'd go there and take advantage of the opportunity to apply to retain my German citizenship (the plan failed because the guy turned out to be a dick, but never mind that). Anyway, he saw a vending machine selling Mr. PIBB and immediately exclaimed, in disgust, "What is this 'Mr. Pissss'?!"
The moral: sometimes a B is just a B, not a ß. It's only an Eszett when it is!
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kept saying "Shibe" all the time
Trivia: a native German speaker in my day would almost never use it by itself except in the sense of "worthless" ("Das ist doch alles Scheiße!"). For cussing, it's more fun when combined with other words. ("Hundescheiße" is a favorite).
In the days before battery key fobs, searching drunkenly for one's car, one might exclaim "Wo in der Teufel ist mein Scheißauto?!"
For some reason, I keep reading books about one-eyed protagonists, and now I'm watching Kubo. What's going on?
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kept saying "Shibe" all the timeTrivia: a native German speaker in my day would almost never use it by itself except in the sense of "worthless" ("Das ist doch alles Scheiße!"). For cussing, it's more fun when combined with other words. ("Hundescheiße" is a favorite).
In the days before battery key fobs, searching drunkenly for one's car, one might exclaim "Wo in der Teufel ist mein Scheißauto?!"
Okay, here's what I'm wondering, in the wake of many, many conversations with my German friend from boarding school back in 86-88: The word scheiße, in German, is not definitionally associated with the gastrointestinal tract the same way the word sh!t in English is, correct? 'Cause the two sound like cognates, but scheiße is much closer in meaning to schlock in Yiddish, right?
Zum Teufel, I'm sorry I hurt your eyes!
Yeah, German geography. Fun.
Only thing more difficult to keep track of is the web of dukes, barons, electors, herzogs, margraves, etc., etc.
After I finish it, I'm thinking of reading Geoffrey Barraclough's The Origins of Modern Germany even though it doesn't get to the Sixteenth Century until the last chapter.
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I'm still pretty sure Thuringia does show up in some old S&S. Some Conan rip-off. Maybe one of the ones someone else finished? Or maybe one of Lin Carter's.Thongor of Lemuria.
Monica Bellucci's character in The Brothers Grimm is referred to at one point in the film as the "Thuringian Queen." Don't know why I remember that.
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The Silk Roads - A New History of the World.
World history focussing on the Middle East / Central Asia and the importance of trade. Well worth a read if you are interested in history.
Okay, here's what I'm wondering, in the wake of many, many conversations with my German friend from boarding school back in 86-88: The word Scheiße, in German, is not definitionally associated with the gastrointestinal tract the same way the word sh!t in English is, correct? 'Cause the two sound like cognates, but scheiße is much closer in meaning to schlock in Yiddish, right?
Both, but as a cuss-word seems more firmly rooted in the latter. It's all about context!
For simply describing defecation, there are plenty of other words like Stuhlgang (literally "stool movement"), or Entleeren ("to empty") as a verb. Kind of like in English there are a lot of words for the process or results, but only one of them is a cuss.
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I got 3 new-to-me Robert Silverberg books from the closing sale at the used bookstore:
a lovely hardback of Shadrach in the Furnace,
The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, a collection of short stories,
and
a Belmont 2-in-1 of Giants in the Earth, by James Blish, and We, the Marauders, by Robert Silverberg. With lovely 1950s cover art of robots and a mad scientist dissecting a giant woman and two space-men encountering green aliens!
I just finished Conspiracy of Ravens by Lila Brown, sequel to Wake of Vultures. A damn good Weird Western series.
I started The Diabolic by S.J. Kinkaid. It's a space opera about a little girl's pet assassin/bodyguard, from the POV of the assassin. So far, the writing is very uneven. Some is competent, and some is really bad. I guess it's going to be a fish-out-of-water story where the assassin pretends to be the girl, and has to learn about human emotions and politics and not just kill everyone. I'm only 2 chapters in, and she's already killed 3 men, a girl, and offered to kill the girl's mother--to the mother! Like I said, a lot of it isn't very good. I'll probably give it a couple of more chapters....
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Saturday, we had a contact session at a local coffee house. I haven't been getting much reading done lately, so I showed up early, bought some overpriced cup and sat in the corner reading the Brigadier Gerard stories with its glorious cover of Napoleonic soldiers in battle.
The contact session was with a young woman who had recently read the first chapter of Lenin's The State and Revolution. She had a bunch of questions about terms used in the book, "national chauvinism" and "bonapartism"and a couple of others I forget at the moment, and I got to keep gleefully pulling out the Brigadier Gerard book to refer to the Napoleonic soldiers on the cover.
So that was fun, but even better, was their honor system "Take-a-Book, Leave-a-Book" shelf which had a copy of Steven Brust's Jhereg. Have been haphazardly picking up books in the series for a couple years now, thanks to Kirth Gersen and these boards and that was before discovereing that Brust is a true-blue Trotskyist believer (even if he is a Healyite), but hadn't yet, ever picked up the first in the series. Huzzah!
(I totally didn't leave a book.)
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Polished off Arguing about Slavery over the weekend. The chapter a day system ended up working against me since the chapters are often quite short. Miller is also way more boring than I am and I am incredibly boring.
Then I read Hunted, the first book of the Iron Druid Chronicles. It has a teen romance cover and was two bucks. I don't know if it was good, but it was fun. May have been more fun without all the Irish mythology where none of the letters mean anything, but the main character is a two thousand year old druid so one can't really avoid it. He runs a new age bookstore/coffee shop in Arizona. He's also happily amoral, so it's a bit like the Dresden Files minus Harry's more tedious inclinations. The apprentice he picked up at the end left me a bit cold, though. Went to TV Tropes and found out that my reaction to her is pretty common. I hoped that the obvious setup was going to be a red herring and he'd pick up the goth guy that works for him and kept having near-miss encounters with magic.
Now I'm about halfway through the only biography of David Rice Atchison I've ever seen cited, which I paid half the apparently going rate for and is still one of the most expensive books in my library that I didn't buy for a university course. It's ancient (1961) and remarkably spare for a biography. I'm used to the sort where the author gushes and goes into great detail about the subject's inner life. (It's one reason I don't like biography in general, though I've listened to a few as audiobooks for entertainment.) This is basically "he did this thing, then this other thing happened." His personal life barely enters into it at all and references to his personality are limited.
The last one is really weird because there aren't many sources who think Atchison isn't a character. He's a hard-drinking, rough frontier dude quite popular with his peers. Doesn't seem to have ever married or even courted. But this is an extremely political biography. The author wasn't trying to write a life as such...despite the argument early on that Atchison is misunderstood and unfairly maligned.
In other news, I'm in occasional social contact with a pulp scholar who mostly studies Lovecraft. We talk racism.
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I picked up the second book in the Dandelion Dynasty series by Ken Liu at the library today. I don't know why because I don't really have time to read its 880 pages right now. But I'm going to try, darn it! In between packing to move and my new job with its 45 min. commute... I'm unduly optimistic aren't I?
Oh snap, there's an audiobook! I might try that if the reading thing doesn't work out.
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Y'know, when you hear that a guy that's known for his excellent short stories is going to start writing novels, you don't expect them to have quite the physical heft that Liu's first two have had. The second one is close to requiring a weapons license to own.
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Now that I've finished off 'Three Cheers For Dangly', I'm reading 'April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against The Medici' by Lauro Martines, a heartwarming tale of Italian intrigue and multiple public stabbings, and 'Listen To This: Miles Davis' B#@&~es Brew' by Victor Stankovic.
I also read a book called 'European Arms and Armour' by a man with a double-barrelled name I can't remember, which had far, far too much detailed information about plate armour in it and also drawings of falchions with knuckle-guards ascending from the pommel. I'm not quite sure these actually existed.
After reading several of his one-shots (Elantris, The Rithmatist, Warbreaker), I'm diving head-first into the Cosmere with Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn. Near as I can tell, this is where the Allomancy books start, right? For those of you who've read them, can you tell me if this is a good spot to begin on his series writing? He's reached a point where trying to figure the best place to begin can be daunting.
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Imagine my delight when I went into the Oxfam bookshop today and found three books starring paizo.com's own Kirth Girsen! Well done, Kirth, and congratulations, too, for already killing 2/5ths of the Demon Princes!
I've read book two, which I liked apart from the rather Scooby Doo-esque ending.
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I also found a reprint of a 1890s-1900s shagger's guidebook called 'The Horn Book', which contained some relatively sensible techniques, some rather silly ones - 'Dog-Style Flying', 'The Sharpshooter' (where you stand over the other side of the room, and...), and 'The Herculean Feat' (Ohh, clean out my stables, you magnificent he-beast!!) - and some extremely silly ones, like 'The Wheelbarrow', where the female partner grips a little stool with castors on the bottom or a stick with wheels on each end, apparently, and the male partner picks her up by the legs and trundles her about while busily doing the Necessary.
If anyone feels sufficiently adventurous to give this a go, please do let me know how you get on, though you're paying your own hospital bills.
Now that I've finished off 'Three Cheers For Dangly', I'm reading 'April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against The Medici' by Lauro Martines, a heartwarming tale of Italian intrigue and multiple public stabbings, and 'Listen To This: Miles Davis' B!%$!es Brew' by Victor Stankovic.
I also read a book called 'European Arms and Armour' by a man with a double-barrelled name I can't remember, which had far, far too much detailed information about plate armour in it and also drawings of falchions with knuckle-guards ascending from the pommel. I'm not quite sure these actually existed.
It looks like they did, or do, at least, as people are making them today.
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The Writer's Tale by Russel T Davies and Benjamin Cook. The most current section being the e-mail conversation between the two authors titled "James Marster's Arse."
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Reading some bioremediation texts, a sometimes annoying Swedish novel called Analfabeten som kunde räkna (the illiterate who could count), To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer, and She is the Darkness by Glen Cook. I'm almost done with the Pathfinder Tales novel Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones, which I like more than his other novel Stalking the Beast. I'm still a little disappointed by it because my Mirian/Jekka ship seems to be getting less and less likely.
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I'm reading The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, by Robert Silverberg. It's a collection of short stories. Some of them I love: particularly "A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa," which is about a guy trying to score some psychedelic mushrooms
But some of them aren't so great: particularly "The Man Who Floated in Time," which is the least imaginative time-travel story ever.
I still haven't started Liu's The Wall of Storms, but I'm reacquainting myself with the characters from the first book, half of whom I'd utterly forgotten.
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I just finished Brian Wilson's autobiography. Unlike the 1991 book ghostwritten by his former domineering quack doctor, this one reads like a conversation with Wilson. It was surprisingly entertaining, despite BW re-treading many topics that are familiar to Beach Boys fans, and his stream-of-consciousness narrative style. In particular there's one paragraph where he talks about going to an instrument rental house to get a particular type of organ for a recent solo record. He talks about the family pedigree of the owner (Jan Berry's brother, or something like that), somehow segues to a comment about Neil Young (he's a real nice guy), and then goes back to the story of renting the organ. Which he ended up omitting from the final mix, anyway.
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Polished off the Atchison biography, which belatedly told me why it's so spare. Bourbon Dave's papers went up in smoke in 1870. That's the kind of information you'd probably lead with today, but it may have been in a historiography review that got stripped out of his dissertation before publishing. Parrish doesn't say the book is his diss, but it reads like one.
Took a day off to read some Order of the Stick. It's been a long time and I suspect it was correct for it to be a long time. The parts I remembered being bad remain bad and the daily gags are rarely funny. But I'm still sort of reading it so there must be something there.
Looks like the next on the dock is Foner's underground railroad book because I signed up to be part of a panel AMA at Reddit's AskHistorians sometime in the next two months. Someone's going to ask and it looks like I'm the most nineteenth century guy on the panel. I also know almost jack about the railroad, except that a whole lot of folklore grew up around it after the fact. Probably Sinha's book on abolition afterwards, since I'm much stronger on the proslavery side than anti.
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Currently rereading Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (sequel to The Curse of Chalion, which I also recently reread). Besides the solid character-driven storyline (which she excels at in both fantasy & SF), this series is notable for how much thought she's put into the world and its metaphysics, particularly the pantheon of gods (Daughter, Son, Mother, Father, and Bastard) and how their concerns interact.
Earlier this month, I finished Umberto Eco's Baudolino, which is set during the fall of Constantinople in 1204. However, the bulk of the story is flashbacks as the title character (a model type of the unreliable narrator!) tells his life story of searching for the fabled kingdom of Prester John. It's typically erudite Eco fare, so it won't be to everyone's taste, but it's not nearly as long or dense as Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum (the latter of which I make a point of rereading about once a decade, when my brain needs a thorough workout).
I'm not entirely sure what I'll be reading next. Depends on how soon my backer copy of Blue Rose gets here, because that will derail my reading queue for a while. In a good way!
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Currently reading Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth. If your a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and the Deep Ones I highly recommend the first and second anthologies. Shadows and Weird shadows over Innsmouth. I enjoyed all the stories I read so far. Though my favorite so far is Innsmouth Bane by John Glasby. Its a prequel to Lovecraft Shadows Over Innsmouth. Where we get to see how Innsmouth begins its road to hell and damnation.
Any Jack Whyte fans? Im interested in reading his books and would like to hear some feedback first.
Currently rereading Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (sequel to The Curse of Chalion, which I also recently reread). Besides the solid character-driven storyline (which she excels at in both fantasy & SF), this series is notable for how much thought she's put into the world and its metaphysics, particularly the pantheon of gods (Daughter, Son, Mother, Father, and Bastard) and how their concerns interact.
In my current campaign, I have totally ripped off that pantheon (Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Bastard), plus I ripped off the semi-demiurge concept of God's Brother from Peter Hamilton's Neutronium Alchemist series, threw in a Clock Queen as the Grandmother/Prime Mover of the pantheon (also an aspect of the Crone, Mother, and Maiden trinity with the Mother and the Daughter), and added the concepts of the Good Neighbors and Bad Neighbors as related/rival pantheons, as well as some divine servants of the Holy Family, such as the Pet and the Doll, etc.
I have the Holy Family represent the Five Loves (Father: patriotism and love of country and community, Mother: familial love, Son: friendship and platonic love, Daughter: romantic love, and the Bastard: obsession with ideas, items, inventions, innovations, and appetites).
Looks like the next on the dock is Foner's underground railroad book
Didn't realize there was such a thing, but I guess it only came out two years ago.
Two-thirds of the way through Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird which I am enjoying very much and halfway through The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, so, like one-quarter through the collected stories, which I am also enjoying very much.
Haven't gotten back to The Peasant War in Germany, alas.
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Didn't realize there was such a thing, but I guess it only came out two years ago.
Looks like the next on the dock is Foner's underground railroad book
There's remarkably little written about the railroad itself. I had that vague impression and the knowledge that the first generation of historians were a bit too excited about the subject, but Foner confirmed both. (Dude writes a great historiography survey.) Basically you have a few late nineteenth and early twentieth century authors who are there to tell a heroic story about this vast network. Most of the mythology comes from them. One of the major figures just ignored any information he got that didn't point to a robust, stable conspiracy spanning the free states. There it stood until the Sixties, when someone else came through and looked at all the contrary evidence that the railroad was a haphazard, improvised thing with no standard modes of operation and came close to arguing that the UR basically didn't real. Cue another lacuna because the topic's done but there have been two or three books in the last twenty years that push back a little, Foner's included.
This is a pattern a lot of nineteenth century scholarship I'm interested in has. Good news/bad news: That means it's really easy to get a fair grasp of the state of the field by just reading a few books.
...and now I wonder if there's a similar trend in organized crime history. The UR was an illicit activity, which is always hard to trace, but prior to the 1850s it often operated as an open secret with groups publishing ads in newspapers to tell people how many slaves they'd gotten to freedom. That's not far off from, say, the mob in the Twenties. Many of the principals on my end burned what papers they had after 1850 to avoid prosecution (Foner had a student who found a guy who didn't.) but I suspect that's roughly analogous to mobsters just not talking or lying a lot.
In 2014, on this thread, I mentioned that I was reading the original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy by Weis and Hickman (Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning) for the fourth time. That was speaking highly of the trilogy, as I had almost never read an entire series of novels that many times before.
In 2016, on this thread, I wrote that I had started my fourth reading of the immediate follow-up to the Chronicles, the Dragonlance Legends trilogy (Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, and Test of the Twins).
This year, I picked up Legends from where I had left off, and now I'm 3/4 or so through the last book.
In some ways, Test of the Twins seems weaker than its five predecessors. Parts of it look stretched out, like the authors were running low on ideas and desperately tried to fill up space. And parts of it seem implausible even by Dragonlance standards. Like... why should the floating fortress negate the tower's fear effect?*
In fact, when I was reading Legends the third time, I almost didn't finish.
But the book still has what makes Dragonlance great and fun to read. There's a threat to the world and a battle of armies, and the authors relate a good percentage of the story from Tas' point of view, giving us some fun comic relief while keeping the situation looking serious. And of course, the book finally finishes the whole Raistlin plot. Unlike the Chronicles which deliberately left that plot open, Legends finishes the job, dotting all the i's, crossing all the t's, and wrapping up the whole package to leave the reader satisfied in the end.
* (Well, I guess there are many such weak points in the earlier books. For instance, the whole dream sequence in Winter Night could have been written in a more plausible-sounding way.)
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I bought the latest Dragonlance trilogy from both authors awhile back the one thay begins witn Dragons of the Dwarven Depths and ends with Dragons of a Hourglass Magr. I hsve held off reading it. As i want yo read the War of Souls trilogy first. As well o heard from many a reviewer thst the ladtest trilogy no longer has the magic of the previous Dragonlance series as well as being badly written. As in the quality of the writing is written by someone who is just starting out. Not veteran writers.
Another recommendation from my above post about the Lovecraft anthologies The Long Last Night by Brian Lumley. Its the stiry of two surviors in London England. After Cthulhu has risen and everythong associated with his return.
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Downloaded the new Incrementalist book, by Brust & White, last night. Can't wait to read it!
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I'm on chapter 3 of The Wall of Storms. It's fun so far -- there's already been a bar fight and the gods are meddling in the affairs of mortals as much as ever, but there are a ton of characters to keep track of. Also, I think I bruised my hand holding the book up to read -- this is one of the few times I think I ought to get a book-stand.