I love just about anything Harry Harrison wrote, he's sorely missed. Star Smashers is, in fact, a satire on E.E. "Doc" Smith's more gung-ho space operas, mostly the Lensmen series, just like his Bill, The Galactic Hero was cocking a snook at Foundation and Starship Troopers.

Hmm, I wonder if I could re-read the Lensmen (and Skylark) books now? Ah heck, why not - not even in Iain Bank's Culture novels does anyone use dirigible antimatter planets as weapons, and Banks himself throws antimatter around like confetti at times.



Bartleby is a really quick read, a pretty short novelette. It's amazingly modern, I think, in fact I remember seeing a version set in a modern office (with Tom Courtenay?) and it worked perfectly. With you on the nautical stuff, I'm contemplating starting on Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels again, which for me are the best full-rigged stories ever. I still can't bring myself to read the 21st and last book, though. I want to pretend the story goes on for ever...

This post has been edited by tegeus-Cromis: Sep 29 2015, 05:15 PM

Culture of the Teutons, by Vilhelm Grönbech.

It's very interesting, but the way it's written is a little peculiar.

I forgot to mention that after finishing The Last Kingdom I ultimately returned to The Last Plantagenets, though this week has been so screwy I'm not able to focus enough to get very far. The coming week looks to be no better and possibly worse.

Well, finished Buffy the Bowgirl.

Next up; Old Habits Die Hard

I'm also reading The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell.

My favourite thing is the use of the old English and Norse names for places that I'm familiar with, such as Bebbanburg (Bamburgh Castle), Dunholm (my home county, Durham) and Wiire (the River Wear).

Very enjoyable. I was reading it on my Leeds to Darlington train, which passes through York. An odd sensation.

This post has been edited by hazmick: Oct 11 2015, 06:21 PM

Aww, thank you CT! Your support and kind words are wonderful to hear.

I'm very sure you will also greatly enjoy OHDH. It is a fabulous story, and Rider tells it with great skill.

Just read the 8 new editions of the new female Thor. I liked it quite a bit. I even correctly guessed at the identity of new goddess of thunder.

So I finally finished White Jacket. It was a pretty good read, even if a bit preachy about the evils of maritime law in the Navy.

Now I'm re-reading The Hobbit for the first time in oh, thirty five years or so? I've made it as far as where Bilbo picked up the Ring and they escaped the Goblins. That's pretty close to where the first Hobbit movie left off. And there's still quite a bit to go! Makes me wonder what's still ahead!

Well, with NaNoWriMo right around the corner, I figured that the best way to get fired up for it is to dive into some fantasy books. I've been putting off reading them for a while, but now I've just dived back into my Dragonlance books with Dragons of Autumn Twilight: Chronicles Book 1

Oh god, I tried reading that. I quit after 10+ pages of boring-ass combat in a pot-elevator. Transcribing a D&D session can be done fantastically, but that is not the way to go about it. Also, cliches out the wazoo.

Yeah, that bit is something of a low point for the book. But I like the characters(except for that bloody Kender), I rather like the setting, and I like the way it's written.

*Shrugs*

At 0306 this morning I finished Thomas B. Costain's The Last Plantagenets. Took me long enough! In the old days I'd have plowed through a book this size in a couple of days to a week or so at most depending on potential conflicts of interest. Nowadays I find it difficult to maintain focus for any appreciable length of time. For what it's worth, this was my sixth documented reading of the work, the first having concluded 28 Dec 1983. My feeble mind tells me I bought the series during the seventies and read it at purchase, before I began the practice of annotating inside covers with completion times and dates.

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Nov 1 2015, 10:32 AM

I don't know if I'd want to mar the cover jacket with the dates; but still, that is a great idea to log it. I think I might have used a sticky note in the inside jacket of the book rather than write on the original jacket cover though.

I did that for a while too - wrote the date I read/re-read on the inside of the front cover (never on the cover jacket).

But now I have too many books and not enough time - it was a big deal that I re-read The Hobbit for the first time in something like 35 years . . .

I am seriously considering thinning my collection of books - I'm not likely to be reading them again anytime soon, and if I have to move again . . . ugh.

I just have a document on my laptop where I log everything. It is really cool to be able to look back and see what I did several years ago. I have a dozen authors that I read, and it is surprising how quickly time flies before I get back to that same author again. Its like 'what, 2012? Really.'

It is not an issue that I cannot go further back in time as I have only become serious with my books since I bought an e-reader.

Currently I am going through the Dark Tower series (Stephen King). Next up is Darkness at Sethanon (Raymond E Feist).

As I was about to prepare supper (boring but relatively healthy salad) I realized that after finishing The Last Plantagenets early this morning I had neglected to pick my next read. (I evaded the decision at lunch by reading a Maximum PC (magazine) article.) I was at a loss for some time. Nothing appealed. Then I spied Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry. Inside-cover annotations show that I last read it June 2006. I've long considered Kay the best writer active in Fantasy today. Fionavar is, so far as I know, his earliest published novel, and a favorite in the traditional epic fantasy mold. (Later books tend toward historically informed fiction set in alternate worlds with relatively lite fantastical elements.) My only knock against Fionavar, and it's a minor one, is that it features characters from earth transported to another reality who, as is too often the case in such books, fit right in and end up being major movers and shakers. Kay handles it well enough, but I find the premise itself questionable. Donaldson gets the transplanted earthling about as close to perfect as I've encountered with his first two Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever chronicles. (I consider the much later written third chronicle as major disappointment.)

All that to let folk know I am now reading The Summer Tree, book one of Kay's Fionavar Tapestry.

I remember The Summer Tree! I read that a loooong time ago. That was a good one.

That it is. My qualms with transplanted modern-day earthlings slipping so easily into a fantastical medieval environment fade to nothingness once in Fionavar and Kay works his literary magic. Kay is prolly the only author whose works I own in whole, his fantasy writings at least. He's not overly prolific so it's not a huge monetary investment. Push come to shove my top recommendations for someone new to Kay are the single volume Under Heaven and the two volume Sarantine Mosaic (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors). The books I recommend least are Last Light of the Sun, which I feel less inspired than his other output, and Ysabel. I admit a bias against Ysabel, it being set in modern times. Kay, btw, cut his teeth helping Christopher Tolkien edit his father's unpublished works, including The Silmarillion.

I finished Donald Kagan's second book on the Peloponnesian War - The Archidamian War today. Next up is The Peace of Nicias, which was of course anything but peaceful.

One thing that I really speaks to me about this series is how Kagan goes beyond a simple, dreary list of battles and casualty figures, and gets down into the meat of the politics and economics at work. Most of his focus is on Athens, which I am sure is purely because it is the state whose inner workings we have the most information about. After all, Thucydides was an Athenian after all, and was even involved in some of the campaigns he writes about, and assuredly a direct witness to many of the decisions of the Athenian Assembly (not to mention a victim of the plague that so gutted Athens).

Even though this was a war that took place nearly 2,500 years ago, the very same realities governed it as do our modern wars, and our modern states and their foreign policies. Politics is very front and center here, as both Athens and Sparta were internally divided into factions with very different ideas of how things should be done. How each city acted in the war and the peace depended upon which faction was most influential at the time, and of course which faction was most influential depended on what happened in the war and peace at the time.

They did not have political parties like we do now. But these factions did exist. Some wanted peace, some wanted war. Some wanted war on certain terms, but not on others. Some of course were looking out for their own interests, and used to war or peace to further their own personal fortunes. Alcibiades was certainly obvious here, but so too was King Pleistonax of Sparta.

Money of course was important as well. We know a great deal about Athen's expenditures throughout the war, thanks to their public records (that were inscribed in stone). That is something that many people never think about. But as Cicero said: "The sinews of war are infinite money." You cannot fight a war without it. Athens went into the war with a vast treasury of about 6,000 talents built up thanks to her empire. It also had a substantial income of 600 talents a year it received in tribute from its empire. But war is expensive, especially naval war, and sieges. The Athenian treasury leaked silver like a slashed jugular vein. During the early period of the Archidamian War they were spending on average 2,000 talents a year on the war. Obviously they could not keep up fighting a war like that for long, even with special taxes and massive increases to the tribute their subjugated 'allies' were forced to pay them annually.

And of course just like today, people on both sides went to war with the absolute certainly of their own victory, and no consideration that they might lose. Naturally they prepared for the last war they fought, not for the coming one, and were completely unready. This does not just go for the Spartans, who thought they could just invade Attica for a month, chop down a few trees, and lure Athens into a land battle that would end up with them suing for peace. But also for Pericles, who was so certain that Athens was invulnerable that the Spartans would come to their senses after a few years and just give up fighting. Everyone was in for a big shock when reality set in.

Finally, we also see the importance of neutrals and wooing them to one side or the other. It was neutrals and their conflicts that played a major role in the war starting to begin with. Both Athens and Sparta were often targets of smaller states who tried to get them to intervene on their behalf, in affairs that had nothing to do with the larger states. Just like today. And neutrals joined the war on both sides not because they cared about Athens or Sparta, but because it gave them a pretext to attack their neighbors, who just happened to be all allied with the other side.

The whole thing is a gigantic, ugly mess. It is also a great primer for anyone who wants to write about wars in their fiction. Here you can see examples of not just battles, but the social forces that drive states to war and peace. There are the debates and political back-biting between opposing factions in the same city. Then very real fact that you cannot fight a war when you cannot pay your army.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 5 2016, 09:52 PM

At 0324 this morning I concluded my sixth reading of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree, book one of The Fionavar Tapestry. I will almost certainly begin book two, The Wandering Fire, ere day's end. This and its companion novels, assuming I finish them in time, are at the moment front-runners as 'best reread of 2015'. I've read so few novel-length books this years it's rather unfair to issue my yearly reading awards, so small is the pool. I'll do so anyway, when the time comes.