At 1236 this afternoon I finished my third reading of The Lost Prince, volume one of Paul Edwin Zimmer's The Dark Border. Not, in my opinion, great fantasy, but not bad and worth an occasional read. A problem; for some reason I never acquired volume three. I notice Amazon sells used copies absolutely dirt cheap. Will prolly order it sometime these next few days. In the meantime I'll begin volume two, King Chondos' Ride.

I read that one a long time ago, and King Chondos' Ride as well. I liked them both. I had no idea there was a third one in the series. Unless you mean Ingulf the Mad? I read that one too, but it's not really part of the same story as the other two.

Odd that you too lack the concluding volume, which is titled A Gathering of Heroes. I ordered it a while ago through Amazon, a used copy in supposedly good shape for $0.01US plus $3.99 shipping.

(I'm pretty sure I read Ingulf the Mad too.)

I just looked at my bookshelf, and I do have A Gathering of Heroes, as well as Ingulf the Mad. I had confused the two when I was writing the last time.

Gathering of Heroes and Ingulf are set in the same world as the first two books, but completely different stories. Gathering does include Istvan DiVega, when he was younger, as well as a gathering of other heroes, including elves. The character of Ingulf the Mad is introduced in it. I don't remember the plot of Ingulf the Mad at all. It has probably been over twenty years since I read it.



On a completely different note I read Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire by Robin Waterfield. It was very good. It is the history of Alexander's successors, following them through their first generation (all the men who rode with Alexander) and the eventual creation of the three main stable Successor States - Macedon, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Seleucid Empire.

There has a been a plethora of histories about Alexander, but usually his successors get glossed over in a few paragraphs about how they all fought with one another, and how Antignous One Eye and his son Demetrios Policrates (City-Taker), nearly took over the whole bunch, until the rest ganged up on them and wiped them out. This book goes into all the details. It is not just about battles, but about how the Hellenistic Age created by Alexander's conquests changed not only the East, but also Greece itself, in the way that people thought and acted.

I started Empires and Barbarians by Peter Heather. But it is just too dense, and too filled with examinations of and arguments about historical texts vs. archaeological finds. I think it is aimed more at scholars than 'regular' people, and he often seems to be making a case for how he believes things happened rather than just telling the story - because history is a story. I just wanted a straight-forward telling of how Rome fell and the barbarians laid the foundations of modern Europe in the aftermath. It has a wealth of information about Germanic political and social institutions and their evolution from the 1st through 4th Centuries (as far as I got). But it is written in such clinical fashion that it just hard to keep slogging through it.

Tonight I bought the first four e-books in the Chronicles Of The Last Emperor Of Melnibone. It is a six part series that repackages Michael Moorcock's Elric novellas, plus some other Eternal Champion stories. Unfortunately it puts the stories in the order that they were written, rather than in their actual chronology. So they are scattered all over Elric's history, because that is the way Moorcock wrote them. He didn't have a grand overall vision when he started writing. Instead he just knocked out a story when he needed to pay the rent. Daw did it much better when they put them out on paperback back in the 70s. They put them all in the right reading order.

I did find a handy list of the Elric stories, listing them in their correct order. Maybe soon I will start reading them. It is too bad I couldn't find Tales of the White Wolf in electronic format though.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Aug 6 2016, 04:08 AM

At 1653 this afternoon I finished Shadows of the Storm, volume one of The Image of War 1861-1865. As might be suspected, it's a massive collection of well documented photos from the American Civil War. I own the entire set, buying individual volumes as they were released. They predate my practice of logging completion times and date. I therefore do not know when and how often I read their extensive commentary cover-to-cover in the past. I've certainly ogled the photos a great many time over the years.

(I'm still reading King Chondos' Ride. Shadows... was my "dinner table" read.)


Moorcock and I go way back, to almost the beginning of my love-affair with modern written fantasy. I've read and reread a great many of his Eternal Champion based novels, none recently. I even started a thread on the Moorcock/Elder Scrolls connection on the official Bethesda forum several years ago. Here's what I said back then:

I most recently reread Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series, which I'm quite fond of.

I did start reading Elric of Melnibone, the first in the Elric chronology. Like most books these days, I read it at work over my lunch breaks. I am loving it, in spite of its issues (most notably telling instead of showing, and head-hopping). I first read these books when I was in high school, and I think it is probably where I got my attraction for pale-skinned, white-haired protagonists. I especially liked that unlike all the other fantasy heroes around then, Elric was not a muscle-bound barbarian. In fact, he was often physically very weak. He has a conscience. He grapples with the question of whether or not he should use his power, rather than just doing whatever he wants, simply because he can.

Plus I love the Michael Whelan book covers from the Daw books, especially the Sailor on the Seas of Fate cover

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Aug 12 2016, 01:53 AM

I'm currently reading the second book of the Night's Dawn Trilogy. It's not a bad trilogy, but a little heavy on Mary Sue/Gary Stu characters. And Hamilton seems to have something of an obsession with sex that comes on pretty heavily in his books, prompting all kinds of peculiarities. But I do like the story, in spite of that.

Mary Sue/Gary Stu = "Meh...urk." Hot perverse sex =

BWAAHAA l!!!!!!!

Heh, to be honest, I'm not really sure which of the two traits is more obnoxious

(hence my use of the "eye-rolling" emote, - they didn't have a gagging maggot emote, BWAAHAA!)









This post has been edited by mALX: Aug 12 2016, 08:26 PM

It gets really weird in places. You've got the dead possessing the living, stealing planets, a big mystery of alien history, and an all but imprisoned scientist with the keys to the galaxy's most dangerous superweapon. Oh, and Al Capone's back. And then you've got the hero character bonking any willing woman he comes across(which is nearly all of them, by the way), and some stupid girl who's fallen in love with him wandering off into space looking for him/chasing the villain, with people tripping over themselves left and right to help her.

I love the story, I just wish some of the characters would stop interrupting it with their shenanigans

Geez, that actually sounds like a story I might like, Give me shenanigans or give me death! BWAAHAA!

Obligatory image from the internet

At 2315 yesterday evening I finished my third reading of Paul Edwin Zimmer's King Chondos' Ride. A good read, though in my opinion it lacks a satisfying ending, leaving much of interest unresolved. I had hoped A Gathering of Heroes would address this but, as SubRosa says, that book is not a continuation of The Dark Border series but rather a separate novel set in the same world, spotlighting one of Dark Border's main characters.

Speaking of A Gathering of Heroes, it arrived with yesterday's mail. In an clear plastic envelop from the Post Office apologizing for any shipping damage. The sender's package was indeed pretty banged up, and soggy to boot. Sogginess was thankfully confined to the outside. The book itself is fine. I read its first few pages before nodding off for the night.

Wohohohoho. Just finished reading L.A Confidential and I gotta say; I literally cut my hand just turning the pages. That book was THAT sharp and cutting. Going to digest what I've seen from that book and incorporate some of the things I like into my own repertoire. As much as I like writing, I still haven't found my own .... *way* of writing things. I think I'm spread out in my techniques, if that makes sense. I like Elroy's style well enough that I'm going to order the other parts of the Quartet. In fact, I liked L.A Confidential so much that I'm currently poisoned with an obsession about the crime genre. I'm going to have to find me some more of them. In the meantime I'll satisfy myself by re-reading The Red Dragon up to Hannibal.

Haven't seen anything new you've written except your RP's; but you sure used to have an Awesome voice writing. To this day I can remember some of your early works, they were that powerful and effective; inspiring. And even when you hadn't written anything at this site ln years; when you entered that anonymous writing contest here I recognized your style instantly.

At 1552 this afternoon I finished my second reading of Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Neveryon. The book consists of five novellas (?) tied together by a shared "world" and characters, with Preface and Appendix. I recall nothing of my first reading other than the gist of the first subsection of the first novella. If not for a completion date of 5 Dec 1997 written on the inside of the front cover I would suspect that I'd not read beyond that subsection. Indeed this time round the Preface put me off a bit so that I questioned whether to continue on. I persevered and am glad I did, having ended up enjoying the book very much. Though I've no conscious memory supporting this, my mind tells me I liked Neveryon appreciably better this reading than the first.

Tales is the first of a four book series. I own it and the next two but find no evidence of the final volume in my library. If further searches fail to unearth book four I'll attempt to order it through Amazon.

That said, my brother just loaned my a book by John Cleese. I might well read that before resuming the Neveryon series.

I read a couple of Heinlein books yesterday: Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters.

Starship Troopers was pretty solid. Though it got a little tiresome the way he'd wander off to spend three or four pages of unnecessary detail about something that wasn't really relevant. This is one of those books that I prefer the movie of.

The Puppet Masters I thought was better. No rambling diatribes, better flow, and more funkiness really. Those aliens just rate better than the ones in Starship Troopers in my opinion. The only real criticism I have of the book is the character Mary, who's just all kinds of screwed up, and isn't really a character so much as a plot device.

At 1339 this afternoon I finished my first reading of John Cleese's So, Anyway... (the Making of a Python). This was a loan from my brother. I am not normally much interested in the lives of modern-day pop culture "celebrities" (or celebrity itself) unless the person or persons in question is in some capacity an extraordinary individual in their own right and/or has lived through interesting times and experiences. The Cleese book is possibly the only such bio in bro's library I actually asked to borrow, rather than having been loaned unsolicitedly. me being a great fan of the Python series and movie spinoffs as well as his non-Python film A Fish Called Wanda.

I enjoyed it.

Not sure which of several reading options I'll next tackle.