The Gaming Den

Prak: imagining Beowulf at the market brings up images of him boasting about swimming under sea while growing crazy gardens and fighting sea serpents.

Also recently picked up an interesting set of books. Mike Carey's Castor novels.

"The Devil you know" and "VIcious circle."

It's a mix of Harry Dresden and John Constantine (err comic rather than
Neo-Woah-I'm-from-The-Matrix) who deals in ghosts. It's pretty good but just doesn't have that much exposure.

He has about four-five books out with the sixth coming out in UK currently.

A_Cynic wrote:It's a mix of Harry Dresden

You have aroused my interest.

Via Washington Monthly...

[url=http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html wrote:Kung Fu Monkey (Rogers)[/url]]"Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs."

So today I visited a used bookstore having its Going-out-of-business sale (the owner's retiring).

I picked up a bag of books for fourteen dollars.

To whit:

The Diamond Throne (replacing my old copy, which has been read for so many years it's held together with packing tape)

The Sapphire Rose (49 cents. Besides, my copy of THAT is also starting to wear out)

The Dilbert Future

The Eye of the World (I, oddly enough, have High Hunt and Dragon Reborn, but not the first one.)

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Twelfth Night (One of the few Shakespeare plays I actually like)

That anthology with the Terry Pratchett short story "The Sea and Little Fishes"

One of those joke dictionaries, this one about sailing (I have an 'uncle'--really a family friend--who's an honest-to-goodness Bayou La Batre shrimp boat captain, and I'm pretty sure he'd find it funny.)

Probably a couple of others that I've already mislaid.

Thing is, I kinda know the store owner, having helped out at a charity book sale there. So some of the things I bought were in the nature of contributing to her retirement.

A buddy loaned me a book of Star Wars shorts stories--Tales of the Bounty Hunters. I've read three of the five stories so far.

Oddly enough, the one starring Boba Fett is the worst so far. It portrayed Fett as being super-Lawful Neutral alignment, and really concerned about his personal morality, and also deals with how poorly Fett ages--bad knees by the time of Return of the Jedi, fifteen years later he has one prosthetic leg and he's undergoing constant medical treatment to keep from developing a cancer.

Which really threw me.

Anyway, the two other stories I read weren't bad. They were actually pretty interesting in how they dealt with a droid point of view.

I'm reading Lovecraft's Dream-cycle stories. It is actually good which is perhaps a suprise since hes so hyped.

Draco_Argentum wrote:I'm reading Lovecraft's Dream-cycle stories. It is actually good which is perhaps a suprise since hes so hyped.

I went on a Lovecraft binge a while back. For me, he was hit or miss--or, I should say...When he was good, he was really good, and when he wasn't, he was just ho-hum. Whisperer in Darkness had the hair on my arms standing up on towards the end.

Although I do imagine that the stories would have more impact if you weren't reading them in collection form, and therefore weren't in a position to see patterns.

In Lovecraft-a-verse, pay attention when the dogs start making a racket.

I've tried reading Lovecraft, picked up the Case of Charles Dexter Ward a while back, and I just haven't gotten very far into it. But I need to ask, for the type of person who goes to horror movies to see the monster, not to get scared(and, honestly, doesn't get frightened by fiction) how enjoyable are Lovecrafts books, generally, do you think?

Prak_Anima wrote:I've tried reading Lovecraft, picked up the Case of Charles Dexter Ward a while back, and I just haven't gotten very far into it. But I need to ask, for the type of person who goes to horror movies to see the monster, not to get scared(and, honestly, doesn't get frightened by fiction) how enjoyable are Lovecrafts books, generally, do you think?

Well you're really not going to see the monster much. Most of Lovecraft's monsters are described as being "indescribably horrible" and similar things.

Prak_Anima wrote:I've tried reading Lovecraft, picked up the Case of Charles Dexter Ward a while back, and I just haven't gotten very far into it. But I need to ask, for the type of person who goes to horror movies to see the monster, not to get scared(and, honestly, doesn't get frightened by fiction) how enjoyable are Lovecrafts books, generally, do you think?

I mostly read Lovecraft for the cultural significance of his works. Frankly, I enjoyed them despite the monster never really being described and never being afraid. Probably it's because I appreciate some of the ideas he included in his writing. Some of his work is cool, probably in the same way that SciFi stories were to its fans, and I use it as one source of the material that gets mangled up with everything else I like.

Prak_Anima wrote:I've tried reading Lovecraft, picked up the Case of Charles Dexter Ward a while back, and I just haven't gotten very far into it. But I need to ask, for the type of person who goes to horror movies to see the monster, not to get scared(and, honestly, doesn't get frightened by fiction) how enjoyable are Lovecrafts books, generally, do you think?

It depends. Some of the stories are pretty good, and Lovecraft had a flair for occasionally delivering a shock.

Also, the copyright ran out on Lovecraft back in '07, so I can only imagine that his complete works went up as soon as people realized that.

So I'd recommend The Whisperer in Darkness, The Dunwich Horror, Shadow over Innsmouth for starters.

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lo ... rkness.htm

I have just started reading the (abridged) Princess Bride. It is quite excellent so far, though a bit different from the movie.

I read a Planescape story I rather liked recently.
http://www.deathstar.org/~krlipka/ps/fi ... edust.html

So far monsters get description if they're on screen. It actually reminds me of WH40k fluff text quite a bit. There a lot of hooks and references that never get any detail. Theres even an air of grim darkness going on.

Funnily enough, I don't actually enjoy the HP lovecraft books much. They are cool conceptually, but the overblown writing style becomes rather turgid after you read more than a half a dozen of the stories total.

The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King.

Game On,
fbmf

Oh, I liked that one. He says the first book took the longest to write of any book he's ever done, and enjoyed it immensely. Apparently, though, he had to slide back into his style to do the remainder, just to get the story done before he died.

Yes, I know Stephen King is not dead, that's just what he said, tho.

-Crissa

A shame he dropped the ball on book 7. My DM and I were sorely disappointed. But then I do hear that ending things right is *hard*.


Recently I was on vacation to the Dominican Republic, and went on a reading binge. Plowed through Frank Herbert's "Dune", Sergei whatever's "Daywatch", Larry Niven's "Lucifer's Hammer", Alan Dean Foster's "A Call to Arms", and part of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods".

I'd highly recommend Lucifer's Hammer and American Gods. The former scared the crap out of me, given how he described the disaster. American Gods was just well-written and interesting, especially when I actually knew who most of the gods were. Frank's writeup for Dead Man's Hand helped a fair bit.

My wife and I disagree on "the Dark Tower" set quite a bit. I loved the feel of the first book and loved the rest of the books as well until the author showed up and then it went downhill. The wife was disheartened with book 1 and put the series down. Book 1 was "good, bad, and the ugly" for me and book 2 & 3 reminded me of of dirty harry movies.

Meikle: if you liked Gaiman's "American Gods", then you should pick up his more light-hearted "Anansi boys" which is barely set in the same universe in that it deals with the repercussions of papi Anansi's antics.

I just finished Gaiman's latest book "Graveyard book" which was a light easy read and slightly reminiscent of "Jungle book" but not really as close a parallel as everyone seems

Finished Fritz Leiber's "The Wanderer." It's a sci-fi yarn that's different from his Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories.

I'm trying some new work by Jim Butcher that's not his "Dresden Files" but just generic fantasty called the "codex of Alera" so we will see how that goes.

reaading a linguistic book on the history of script but my medication keep making me groggy so I have to keep rereading sections. With fiction, I can ignore this feature. But non-fiction, it's annoying, as Its a little more important.

I haven't actually read a book recently, been too busy gaming and schooling and junk. I'll end up reading the second half of the Dresden Files series as soon as my roommate gets them, the series I just plain enjoy, and it's got a magic system I can stand behind.

Afterwards, I'll likely start looking a bit harder for "Who Censored Roger Rabbit".

Abebooks.com is where I go for hard to find or out of print crap. They have dealers wordwide. The books are often like a couple bucks each, but the shipping...Oy.

Oh, if you want to talk Roger Rabbit, there's a good book on the topic that was the background for that movie - the rubber companies buying out the rail and transit companies. Unfortunately I don't recall the title. Hmm...

-Crissa

Here's an awesome article on The Forgotten Man, a fan-fiction of Herbert Hoover and the failure of the New Deal.

-Crissa

I replaced my copies of the Icewind Dale trilogy, the previous set having finally given up and decided to shed pages beyond my ability to persuade them to stick together.

I'm trying to reread Streams of Silver, but the personality differences between early Entreri and the recent Entreri have me laughing. The first time I read Streams of Silver (what, eight or ten years ago?), Entreri was just plain cool. Now...his earliest appearance has me noticing just how hard Salvatore was trying to make him the evil assassin.

I picked up The Curse of Chalion cheaply at a local bookstore a few months ago. Recently, I discovered that the library I visit at least weekly had further books in the series. I just finished Paladin of Souls and am working on The Hallowed Hunt.

I am definitely enjoying the books, but I have found that they are much better if I do not read the summaries on the jackets. Much of The Curse of Chalion's plot was spoiled for me by the summary.