What have you been reading?

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My Audible pick for the month. A collection of great horror short stories from the underrated master Dennis Etchison.

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Just finished this.
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And I'm now a big(ger) GSP fan. Let's leave it at that:smile:.

OTOH, I'm now reading this:
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...while trying to understand whether it's different from this one. I mean, are they merely different "editions" (like B/X and OD&D), or "different editions" like OD&D and D&D 4e:wink:?

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It can wait until I'm done with reading the one I got, of course. But so far, I like the book, and Black Friday is approaching:thumbsup:!
 
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With no small amount of effort I found someone I trusted to restore the hardcover copy of the Compleat Dying Earth. This is another example of something I read, hated and now I realize my english sucked back then.
Yesterday I sat on the sofa and read the first chapter, Turjan of Miir, by the time I met T'Sai and T'Sain I was hooked, and I'm sad that I can't sit and read everything in one go.

Like serious the first chapter was f***ing good, can't wait to read more.
 
Started reading this a while back but then misplaced it. Just found it today in an unlikely location. I guess I'll have to start over as I barely recall it--fortunately I had only read a chapter or two.
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Obtained this handsome volume from the bargain section of Barnes & Noble since I have only read Mansfield Park, and that was for a college class while studying for my literature degree.
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Finished my binge-read of The Boys. All 72 issues. It was well-done, but now that I'm finished with it, I'm ready to read something bright, cheerful, and hopeful.... open to suggestions.

Since the whole point of the series seems to be that superheroes are stupid and a Very Bad Idea, it seems apropos that one of the supers has the doubly-stupid name Black Noir. It literally means "black black!"

Also read the Red Sonja/ Conan miniseries from a few years ago. No, not the Conan/ Red Sonja miniseries from a few years prior to that :wink: . Enjoyed it pretty well. Decent art and story.
 
Taking a bit of a break from reading non-fiction for the moment. Last night I finished Donald Hamilton's Death Of A Citizen, the first of his Matt Helm novels. Anyone who is only familiar with Helm through the Dean Martin movies might be in for a bit of a shock reading this. The violence is fairly realistic and brutal, and while Helm isn't devoid of emotions by any means, he is a pretty coldhearted sonuvabitch when circumstances call for it. The writing is tight and fairly naturalistic, with enough characterization to make you care, and enough details and flavor with the setting to help you buy into the story.

Next up on deck is Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance, the first of his Nero Wolfe mysteries.
 
Tulpa Girl said:
Next up on deck is Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance, the first of his Nero Wolfe mysteries.
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Rex Stout's novels are great fun. Archie and Nero are such a terrific matched set of leads. (The television adaptation with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin was very well done, too, I think by A&E.)

Along with various other books, I'm reading this:
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Dumarest said:
Rex Stout's novels are great fun. Archie and Nero are such a terrific matched set of leads. (The television adaptation with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin was very well done, too, I think by A&E.)
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I loved the A&E series when it was on. It will be hard for me to not visualize Archie and Wolfe as Hutton and Chaykin when I start reading it.
 
Tulpa Girl said:
I loved the A&E series when it was on. It will be hard for me to not visualize Archie and Wolfe as Hutton and Chaykin when I start reading it.
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Watching one while folding laundry on a rainy day. Great sets, great costumes, great scripts, great acting, great jazzy music, and lots of verve, there's nothing I didn't enjoy about it except that they only made two seasons. Best thing ever on A&E. I read the books before seeing the series and as far as I'm concerned Hutton's breezy Archie Goodwin and Chaykin's cantankerous Wolfe were perfect.
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Blue Moon, the latest novel in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, came in for me at the library today! Yay! I was number 184 in the queue when I first put the book on hold, but my library system owns ~100 copies, so it didn't take too long.

For those who are unfamiliar, it is a thriller/mystery series. The main character, Jack Reacher, is a former Army MP who now wanders the country and always ends up in some kind of trouble, usually vs. a local conspiracy of some sort, and then proceeds to get out of trouble using a combination of brains and violence.
 
Alexandre Dumas, 'nuff said. I like Oxford World's Classics because they have very informative endnotes that give a lot of context to enrich the reading experience.
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Shemek hiTankolel said:
View attachment 14165

The last time that I read this was in High School, and I had forgotten how good the story was. Translated by Martin Hammond.
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A good companion to The Iliad is What Homer Didn't Tell (untitled in the original and called such now for convenience) by Quintus of Smyrna, which picks up the rest of the story, since at the end of The Iliad Achilles is still standing and Troy hasn't fallen to the wooden horse ruse. It tells what happens to Achilles, the Queen of the Amazons, and the King of Ethiopia, and about the funeral games held in honor of Achilles, the victory of Odysseus in his contest with Aias, the death of Paris, the trick with the wooden horse, and the capture of Troy.
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Very nice. I haven't seen that before. I'll have to look at that after I finish the Odyssey. I havent read anything on ancient Greece in ages, and it has recently caught my attention.
 
Shemek hiTankolel said:
Very nice. I haven't seen that before. I'll have to look at that after I finish the Odyssey. I havent read anything on ancient Greece in ages, and it has recently caught my attention.
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In my opinion the best translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are those by Stephen Mitchell. He's quite accurate to the content of the Greek, especially in retaining its coarse violence, while still having readable English prose. Fagles is another good translator, being more accurate to the poetry of the original. For me though he doesn't have the aggressiveness needed, but it's a very close toss up between Fagles and Mitchell.
 
Séadna said:
In my opinion the best translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are those by Stephen Mitchell. He's quite accurate to the content of the Greek, especially in retaining its coarse violence, while still having readable English prose. Fagles is another good translator, being more accurate to the poetry of the original. For me though he doesn't have the aggressiveness needed, but it's a very close toss up between Fagles and Mitchell.
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Ok, good to know. I'll have to see if my library has one these two in their stacks. I haven't gotten too far into my current read, so it might be worth having a look for them.
 
Shemek hiTankolel said:
Ok, good to know. I'll have to see if my library has one these two in their stacks. I haven't gotten too far into my current read, so it might be worth having a look for them.
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Here are the opening sections from Hammond, then the classic English translation (Lattimore) and the two major modern ones (Fagles, Mitchell):

Hammond said:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, the accursed anger that brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies the prey to dogs and the birds' feasting, and this was the working of Zeus' will.
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Lattimore said:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles and its devastation, which put pains thousand-fold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
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Fagles said:
Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end
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Mitchell said:
The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished.
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Just to say Mitchell removes all sections that most modern scholarship considers unlikely to have been part of the poem originally in classical Greece. Which means for example that all of book ten is gone. I've seen quite differing opinions both ways on this.
 
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My preferred translation is Lattimore for the sense of poetry but I often find I prefer the older translations as long as they are reasonably accurate.
 
All the translations in truth are very good. It's really a question of what you choose to sacrifice in one area to get right in another area for the major ones (Hammond, Lattimore, Mitchell, Fagles).
 
Today I read the comic book miniseries Die Kitty Die, by Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz. I'd never heard of Fernando Ruiz before, but I'm a big fan of Dan Parent's art.

The series was a very entertaining parody of Archie-style comic books, and the comic book industry in general. But even if I had hated the story, the Dan Parent art is still great.
 
There are two bookmarks in it because my son saw me reading it for my planned "Star Wars '78" game and decided he wanted to read it, too:
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He's a little ahead of me because I'm (1) still reading The Count of Monte Cristo and (2) I'm jotting down notes for people and places I might use in the game: Crimson Jack, Aduba-3, Jaxxon, etc.

Maybe I'll even use the real Jabba the Hutt:
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"Not Looking Back" by J.L.L. Morales

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Gamebooks by @JLLopezMorales | librojuegos.org

With this article I will try a small experiment. Recently, I was suggested to review gamebooks published by spanish authors. Sadly, most of them haven't been
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Yes, it's a gamebook. But I like the style it's written in, and you can freely visit all places and find different stuff there depending on when you visit and what you've done before:grin:!

Also, the author has written his own RPG, too. Does anyone know anything about it:tongue:?
 
I have a couple of very large shelves that are very deep, so there is a row of books in back behind those you can see. Generally what ends up there is whatever I don't read or use often. I was cleaning out some stuff and found these books, which I totally forgot were given to me for Christmas a few years ago. They were filed alongside my folders of pirated FASA Star Trek RPG material. Obviously that means I need to read them and start a new Trek campaign in 2020.
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Finally finished reading Fer-de-Lance. It's a fun read. One of the noteworthy things to me - and I know I'm hardly the first to notice this - is that it doesn't really feel like the first book of a series. So many of the character and background elements I know from the A&E tv series are already in place (the absence of Inspector Cramer being a notable exception), and for the most feel like they're already part of a comfortable groove.

Next up I may bounce back and forth between re-reading some Clark Ashton Smith and browsing through some more non-fiction, probably The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz.
 
Really enjoyed Dennis Etchison's Dark Country horror short stories, very finely crafted macabre stories reminiscent of Poe, Bowles and Aickman. Going back to some history reading, this time something more modern.

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And now I'm on a gamebook binge...
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Yes, same author as before. I really hope they'd translate the follow-up story as well, “The Sky over Bangkok”.

As a funny note, his gamebooks obviously use a simple system that is about as complicated as the core of PbtA (which is to say, it's not), but still opens lots of possibilities. Me like! I'm wondering whether his JdR (that's RPG in Spanish for you :evil:) "El Reino de la Sombra" also uses it... (Odds are that yes, it does:shade:).
...and I just found it on Drivethru.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com www.drivethrurpg.com
A d20 OGL product?
:sad:
...but then I randomly noticed that it's not using d20, but NSd20. So I read the description after all
"It's like d20, but we did away with levels, hit points and classes"!
OK, I'm now hooked:grin:! I've always believed that this is what d20 should have been like, after all...:thumbsup:

But then I didn't stop there.
Since I was on a gamebook binge anyway (yes, I am, I just received an order), I also revisited the new edition of Avenger! It was recently translated, and I purchased it with the same order as two other gamebooks.
So, I introduce you to...
"Romani Labirinth" by Peter Kardosh and Gabor Nyari (?)
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It's...beyond the rules-bending to discuss what happens in this game. I'm just glad to say that my character survived and thrived despite the difficulties (though I almost got stomped by skinheads). Mission accomplished!


Then I continued with "City Witch" and "Talasam* hunter" (both in one book, though they're by different authors). I liked them, and almost lost City Witch...which was unusual for me when there's no dice!
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Still...mission accomplished, even if by the skin of my teeth.
It is notable that the magical energy witches use is directly connected to their blood sugar. Which made for some funny moments - compeltely intentional, I'm sure. It's totally in the author's style (and yes, I've met her a few times).

What's next? Well, I want to explore a few new ways of passing through the two SLANG books and through City Witch...:shade:
 
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Finished Blue Moon, the latest in Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. It was... fine. I've found most of the books in the series "un-put-down-able," finishing them in a couple days, but this one I gradually read over the course of a week or so. It's not bad or anything; I did enjoy it. It just didn't engage me as well as the other books in the series. I think it hurt that Child never named the town or even specified the state where the story takes place. It's just "east of the Mississippi."
 
Been waiting for these Marv Wolfman comics to go on sale for my Kindle. I remember Vigilante having a big impact on me as a kid so I'm looking forward to revisiting it. It was far more intelligent and thoughtful than the Punisher comics of the late 80s. Right away the artwork by Perez, Colan and Pollard is beautiful and I see a lot of the dense storytelling, satire and complex panelling that later made Watchmen and Dark Knight so influential. Night Force I'm less familiar with but it looks cool and I dig horror comics.

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Finished Larson's history of Wyoming:
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This was a slow read as it is a long enough book. It covers the state from prehistoric times to the present day. Although the vast majority of the book is concerned with after the arrival of the Union Pacific to the state in 1867 and stops basically in 1950s to a large degree. It was interesting for me as I wanted to read about internal settlement in the United States, i.e. the formation of a state not driven as much by immigration from Europe. It basically lays out the state as being driven by various cycles of resource extraction and it was surprising to me how short lived the states "Wild West" days were. To a certain degree it never really had them.

Also read this little intro to Derrida:
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The whole Oxford "A Very Short Introduction" series are great. Little books you can finish in a day or two that get you up to speed on the topic and give you a good reading list if you want to learn more. In my experience they also stop at a very natural point which is about when you would decide if that's as much as you want to know. Much better than typical introductory books which are often heavy enough to serve as textbooks on the subject (which of course they literally often are). I also read one on Gothic literature.

Also we got a new translation of the Táin into Modern Irish. The last one was a play translation written in 1915. I've read Thomas Kinsella's English translation before which is incredibly accurate to the letter and the feel of the original text.

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For comics I've been reading The Sixth Gun and the Deadlands Comics. Great fun if you're into the Weird West:
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