I own that book. I even got it from Paizo! :)
Yeah, it's pretty fun, although I don't see any mention of golden hemorrhoids.
Finished up Conan of the Isles, so I am done with that, by Crom!
Going to wander aimlessly between EAP stories and GV essays until I decide to jump back into the story of David and friends.
Just finished The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman.
Returning to Territory by Emma Bull.
Both are very different fantasy Westerns.
So, Edgar Allan Poe kinda, like, f%%*ing rawks.
Listened to two and a half lectures on him. One deep dude.
Dead Six by Larry Correia and Mike Kupari. It's R rated gun pr0n as opposed to the Monster Hunter series which is hardcore gun pr0n.
Working on A Memory of Light in my elusive spare time. I mentioned to someone recently that I've been reading this series for 23 years and finally got the last one and she said, "Oh, you must be a really slow reader!"
Hee hee!
Michael Huemer - The Problem of Political Authority
So far it isn't nonsense.
Finished the second third of Gore Vidal's United States, so I have now read all the political and personal essays in the voluminous volume, leaving unread, for now, the first third of essays on literary matters.
Also finished all the tales in a for-kids collection of Edgar Allan Poe writings. So far, he's the first writer in the Classics of American Literature tapes I'm listening to that I have decided to read more by. He's awesome!!
Under the tutelage of Comrade Curtin, have started Accelerando by Charles Stross.
Had never heard of the Singularity before (I don't keep up with science stuff) and was wicked excited until I talked to one of my friends who understand how things work and stuff and the way he explained didn't sound at all as interesting as when I was [bubble bubble bubbling] in the parking lot at the Gaming Convention with CC. :(
But still, so far the book is pretty fun.
I finally finished This Republic of Suffering, a book that reminded me why I don't read much of this kind of history. It's not trivial or anything, but it's also pretty uninteresting to me. It was not helped by the fact that many of the later chapters seemed like dull rehashes of stuff already thoroughly explored in the earlier chapters. It's under three hundred pages and at least sixty feel like filler.
The Levellers in the English Revolution, by H.N. Brailsford. Had it for ages and only just got around to reading it.
And the 4th Edition Player's Handbook, because I am a filthy traitor.
Picked up Huntress by Malinda Lo and am racing through it. Non-Western setting with normalized LGBT relationships—very refreshing!
(Also, rhe "supernatural winter" theme here at work has apparently succeeded in spilling over into my home reading. Hmph.)
Started Nightglass last night.
900 gods by Wen Spencer. Fun!
Throne of the Crescent Moon. WOOT!
Under the tutelage of Comrade Curtin, have started Accelerando by Charles Stross.
Had never heard of the Singularity before (I don't keep up with science stuff) and was wicked excited until I talked to one of my friends who understand how things work and stuff and the way he explained didn't sound at all as interesting as when I was [bubble bubble bubbling] in the parking lot at the Gaming Convention with CC. :(
But still, so far the book is pretty fun.
I thought Manfred Macx would entertain you. Post-scarcity agalmic favor-based communism is a fascinating subject.
More science fiction protagonists should work for the Italian Communist Party...
Took a break from Accelerando when I finished the first third and went over and read the Planet News chapter in Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems. Have figured out how to write my own Allen Ginsberg poems:
Write about getting high, write about the food I was eating while I was getting high, throw in some stuff from Eastern religion, throw in some stuff from left-wing politics, more food, more drugs, flash of brilliance about, say, a leper praying on the streetcorner, more Eastern religion, talk about wanting to get my a&@!++% stuffed, more drugs, repeat...
Not much on Allen, though.
Finished Huntress (end got a bit muddled, but a fun read overall—and a queer love story where the same-sexness of the couple isn't the obstacle to the relationship!); just started A Natural History of Dragons, which reads like a memoir of Jane Goodall if she were Victorian and funnier, and had a slightly different set of interests. :P
Started Nightglass last night.
This book is packed with really messed up s!#~. I'm impressed that the author can treat the horror of it all, especially as it happens to children, and also capture how banal it becomes since they're stuck with it for years, without being so disgusting or horrid that I threw the thing down without soft-pedaling it. Holy crap.
It's like Harry Potter as written by Torquemada.
Um...it also made me want to play a cleric of Zon-Kuthon. The initiation rite included a sensible, logical kind of religious experience that I could even distantly relate to on a personal level from having had some painful experiences of my own.
Deathstalker Rebellion by Simon R Green.
This is perhaps the fifth time I have read this series and I never get tired of re-reading it. Recommend it to all that have never read it.
The Iron Wyrm Affair by Lilith Saintcrow.
Second third of Accelerando was even better.
I was kind of worried that the whole book was going to remind me of a Gibson/Stephenson pastiche, but then Stross kicked 'em out of the solar system, all decked out like St. Bartholomew's Day-era Frenchies, with a Shi'ite imam along for the ride and I was, like, cool.
My local commie club is studying Lenin's masterpiece The State and Revolution which I've already read, like, a billion times.
Anyway, was reading Chapter II: The Experience of 1848-1851 and realized that I don't think I've read anything about 1848 that wasn't by Marx. So, I picked up a copy of Revolutions of 1848: A Social History by Priscilla Smith Robertson.
Ah, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc and Blanqui! Good times, but I'm looking forward to chapters that don't take place in France.
Finished Nightglass. I think Fateful Lightning is next but I'm not excited about it. Maybe I need to do another work of fiction before diving back in.
Book alert for Comrade Samnell
The authors, I guess, are way pro-JB; the reviewer not so much.
Best part of the essay:
Nor did I expect to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged.
Actually, Emerson had cimbed another rung up the laudatory ladder, describing the gallows as 'glorious.'"
Vive le Galt!
F. Scott Fitzgerald is smooth like butter...
Book alert for Comrade Samnell
The authors, I guess, are way pro-JB; the reviewer not so much.
Best part of the essay:
** spoiler omitted **
Vive le Galt!
I'm paywalled out of the full article, but Hawthorne always seemed like a dull, misanthropic old Tory to me.
Yeah, the article is paywalled, but the book being reviewed is, apparently, 600 pages of rah! rah! John Brown!
One for the blog, methinks.
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Goblinproofing Your Chicken Coop
Just saw this book. Thought I would share.
Goblinproofing Your Chicken Coop
Just saw this book. Thought I would share.
[Adds Citizens Scholz, Bakeley and Marsh to the List of Enemies of the Revolution to be dealt with on the Night of the Stinking Buzzards, which, of course, is headed by Paizo.}
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Goblinproofing Your Chicken Coop
Just saw this book. Thought I would share.
[Adds Citizens Scholz, Bakeley and Marsh to the List of Enemies of the Revolution to be dealt with on the Night of the Stinking Buzzards, which, of course, is headed by Paizo.}
[Adds Sirs Scholz, Bakaley, and Marsh to list of the Knights of Dice, in honor of their service to the Dice Estate.]
Look, Doodlebug, I know you've got a soft spot for goblins--hell, I know you are a goblin--but every single one of my tenant farmers complains about the loss of chickens to indigent, thieving goblins.
...Excuse me? How much rent I charge my tenant farmers, and the quality of my rental properties, is immaterial to this conversation!
Edit: And yeah, the whole reason I came to the books thread to start with was to commiserate about the death of Chinua Achebe. Sucks.
Edit: And yeah, the whole reason I came to the books thread to start with was to commiserate about the death of Chinua Achebe. Sucks.
I would never read it myself, but Things Fall Apart wasn't bad. I had to do it for a class and one woman was furious over the unflattering depiction of Christian missionaries.
Because it's not like Achebe was writing about how they actually behaved, a fact plenty of whites with quite a bit more interest in saving the lives and health of Africans also noticed, or anything like that. Among the latter, Schweitzer (who drifted into the same category as he got older) pronounced shooting too good for missionaries.
I hadn't heard about Achebe. :(
That is sad news. His poetry was tops.
So, it's hard to decide which hat to go for on this one:
From a book I read a long time ago about Methodist missionaries in Uganda:
So, they did, and it was nice. Uganda is supposed to be real scenic territory (when the population isn't being slaughtered or slaughtering others) and the Methodist missionaries started making some converts. And then they started converting some boys. And then they started converting some of the king's stable of catamites.
Well, it turns out that becoming a member of the Methodist Church means that you don't let your king bugger you. And some of the catamites started refusing to sexually service the king. Praise Jesus! So, then the king killed the ex-catamites and practiced another cultural tradition frowned upon by the Methodist Church: cannibalism.
So, that wasn't fun, but, to make matters worse, a bunch of French Catholic missionaries showed up around the same time. France then, as today, was running around Africa overthrowing countries here, making sweet deals for their natural resources over there, and they wanted a piece of Buganda. What's that, king? You want to bugger young boys and eat the flesh of your enemies? Well, no, our God doesn't approve, but if you'll sign this treaty here, we'll be happy to render unto Caesar what is his.
Anyway, I don't remember the details: whether the pederastic cannibal king of Uganda got to slaughter the Methodist missionaries, or whether they holed up and were protected by their native converts, but it sounds like it was f%&+ing crazy and eventually the British Imperial Army showed up and chased the French away and, I think, killed the king, and, of course, ruled over Uganda for the next, I don't know, 75 years.
History. It's f*@~ed up.
So, it's hard to decide which hat to go for on this one:
From a book I read a long time ago about Methodist missionaries in Uganda:
** spoiler omitted **...
I can't believe you'd say that about missionaries; it's just unflattering!
So, it's hard to decide which hat to go for on this one:
From a book I read a long time ago about Methodist missionaries in Uganda:
** spoiler omitted **...
Henry Morton Stanley went back into the Congo to scout out Leopold II's personal colonial abbatoir. When your brutality towards black people shocks turn of the century Europeans, you have reached 20th level douchebaggery.
Woops. Stanley not Morgan.
I meant to throw in a clause about doing it from memory.
Here's the book.
Also, I read most of my wicked awesome play Les Mains sales last night.
I'm so awesome.
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In some sort uncontrollable frenzy, I've finished The Count of Monte Cristo (disappointing), The Levellers in the English Revolution (very good), From the Deep of the Dark , by Stephen Hunt (also very good) and got a good way into somebody's History of China. It turns out that there have been several emperors called Yuan-Ti, but it doesn't go on to specify whether they were pure-bloods, half-bloods or abominations.
Also have a couple of Thraxas novels to start on, but what I really want is cheesy sword and sorcery. Hmmm...
So, I just finished the first five, French, chapters of The Revolutions of 1848 and, uh, I think I have to go re-read my Marx.
I don't think I've read either Class Struggles in France or The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon in, um, 20 or so years. And neither of them are available through my town's interlibrary loan program. WTF?!? Now I have to go look through all those boxes of books still in storage...[grumble grumble grumble]
Anyway, Ms. Robertson's book is pretty awesome (so far) and every page has got amazing stuff that I will post later in the History Is Cool thread.
In the meantime, I could read the last third of Accelerando, but I think I'm going to hold off so I can start Catching Fire.
Smash Panem Through Worker's Revolution!