ATTN paper book & movies-on-disc lovers with a Barnes & Noble nearby. Just received an email from them announcing a 40% Off One Item discount 1 Sep thru the close of business 5 Sep. The discount is for the highest price item on a ticket, and excludes stuff like Nook products. Far as know this is the best general purpose discount I've seen them offer. (Buy two get one free offers can beat it assuming you shop carefully and actually want and/or need all three items on the ticket.) Already printed out my coupon, though I don't know that I'll be heading into town between now and then.

I'm currently working my way through the Dragonbone Chair book one of the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, as it was recently recommended to me.

And it is, so far(and I'm over 3/4 of the way through it), a damn good book. I like the characters, I like the story, I like the setting, with one reservation, and the book has done a great job of grabbing me.

But there is still that one reservation, which really kills things for me whenever it rears its ugly head. When it does, immersion breaks, and suddenly I'm reading a book, not enjoying a story.

The problem is the religions. The dominant religion, at least as it's been presented, is a particularly uninspired and unimaginative knock-off of Christianity, which the author hasn't even attempted to hide. And then you get a song that turns out to be about an old god that was displaced by the new religion, Udun: a one-eyed old man, who carries a staff, and wears wide-brimmed hat and a cloak. He even has a day named after him; Udunsday.

It's just jarring to see this fantasy setting undermined everytime religion gets brought into it, both by the lack of imagination and the absence of any attempt from the author to hide that lack.

I'm gonna keep reading, because everything else is great, but there is that fly in the ointment...

Well, I've finished reading Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.

To be honest, I'm not particularly impressed by it.

I'll admit that I kind of blitzed it, but the author just seemed to drag things out by not sharing any information. The heroes had no real plan, just a vague prophecy, so their plan was literally "gather the three magic swords". They had a goal, but no idea what to do once they'd attained that goal(and we learn early on that one of those three is held by one of the villains...). There are nothing but hints of what the villain's up to, and the heroes don't learn it until more than 80% of the way through the third book. The villain's plans barely even move forward in any visible fashion for almost as long. And the warning given in the first book, and repeated numerous times throughout the trilogy, has a similarly late payoff. In fact the author even goes so far as to tease us with a big reveal of the enemy's plans, only to have that character killed moments before she could begin.

It just made the ending so unsatisfying, and somewhat rushed. The heroes never really knew what was going on until too late, never knew what they could actually do to stop the villain, and seemed to triumph as much because they are the heroes as anything else.

And don't get me started on the lengths the author goes to to pull out the happy ending. That's just obnoxious if you ask me.

Most interesting. I obviously have a much higher opinion of the series, while admitting it is not without its faults. To each his or her on, I reckon. I decided to dig up my copy of volume one and make it a potential reread candidate. Took me forever to find it. (It was not with the remaining volumes, which I spotted within seconds of beginning the search.) The inside cover tells me I've read the book(s) five times beginning 1990, most recently mid 2008.

While searching for Dragonbone Chair I unintentionally unearthed The Fifth Sorceress from the depths obscurity to which it was consigned. By the time I reached its end mid 2003 I had long since dubbed it the worst fantasy I'd ever read, a title it retains to this day. Thing is, I no longer recall why I deem it so. That being the case, it too has become a reread contender, and my the gods have mercy on my soul.

For now I continue my second reading of Samuel R. Delany's Neveryona, or The Tale of Signs and Cities. It's been slow going at times, a little too much philosophizing (though that's not wholly accurate) with little action to keep things moving. It is, despite that, very fine writing, with much to praise. (To be fair, most of the first book and much of this one provide a satisfactory melding of "philosophizing" and character development that keeps me hooked.)

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty that I like in the books: I love the setting(outside of the whole religion thing), I like most of the characters, I love the Sithi, the trolls, and the differences in the various branches of mankind, and I even like the slow start to the first book. I just hate some of what he did with it, with the bulk of that reserved for the whole "false messenger" debacle. He was throwing that at the reader for something like two and a half books before actually doing anything with it, and when he does, it wasn't even about the messenger!

I'll no doubt reread them sooner or later, and it'll probably fare a little better from not being blitzed.

For now though, onto the Mistborn Trilogy

At 1025 today, during lunch, I completed a reread The Guns of '62, of volume two of Image of War: 1861-1865, a large format series focusing on photographs from the American Civil War. I'm reading the series at the kitchen table during meals, the books being too heavy and bulky for my decrepit self to read laying on my back in bed.

Alternating between my new book, third in its series, Johannes Cabel and the Fear Institute. Surmised as 'A necromancer of some little infamy joins a band of fools into the realm of dreams to hunt fear itself.' Dark comedy set in a steampunk-ish Victorian period. The other book I'm trying to get back into off n on is the first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT !!!!!!!!!!

At 2254 yesterday evening, 16 Sep 2016 I concluded my second reading of Samuel R. Delany's Neveryona, or The Tale of Signs and Cities. I must admit it was a struggle at times. Page after page after page of what I'll term intellectual discourse. Boy oh boy can his characters wax philosophic, in ways that, to me at any rate, can seem at odds with the books' dawn-of-civilization setting. (The series' faux (?) backstory is that it based on a fragmentary (Earth) manuscript whose original source may harken back as early as 6000BC.) That said, much of the book keeps this, again my opinion, over civilized babble in balance with character and plot development. At those times the book is quite enjoyable.

I have somewhat reluctantly decided to continue on with the next volume, Flight from Neveryon. This will be its first complete reading, assuming I make it to the end. An old bookmark shows that during my first attempt, likely very early 1998, I made it to page 334/5 before, for whatever reason, throwing in the towel.

I do not own the fourth and concluding volume.

I abandoned Flight from Neveryon for now and am 83 pages into Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddle Master of Hed, a book I've read three times, first during June 1986, most recently March 1999.

Well, I just finished the First Law trilogy.

To be honest, I think it's the only trilogy I bought recently that I won't be rereading.

It reminds me of Michael Bay films; lots of big dramatic moments, so many that you go numb to them after a while. And Abercombie doesn't reserve those moments for the main plot, he throws them at everything, regardless of how insignificant to the plot it actually is. So for instance; a man doesn't just learn the woman he's interested in doesn't have that same interest in him, he finds her screwing another guy. And to maximise the moment, there's nothing beforehand to suggest that this would happen. Because these moments come in two flavours: you either see them coming miles away, or they come out of nowhere without anything to set them up.

And the outcome of these moments is always bad, to some extent or other, just to make sure that everything is tainted. So the trilogy plays out as you watch his characters dragged down an ever-descending spiral, with each big moment tailored to do nothing more than delay their progress, for a moment, never to reverse it. And after a while it just gets tiresome. I stopped caring about what happened to the characters, because the downward trend was so blatant that there were only ever two options: death, or to move on to another crappy situation. There was no-one to root for, to get behind, because you knew it would go badly for all of them. Save one.

If you want to see a collection of characters thrown through a grimdark meatgrinder in good setup, then this is the book for you. If, on the other hand, you think such things are better used sparingly, to season a story, then I'd suggest giving it a miss.

"Tales From The Pen Of A Drama Queen," by Joe Abercrombie ...

Heh, more or less

I've now started reading The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks. Nine chapters in, and it's pretty good so far. I can't help noticing how much they changed with the TV show though.

At 1552 this afternoon I concluded my fourth reading of Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddle Master of Hed. I didn't recall enough of it to spoil things. Quite enjoyable. I'll begin the second book, Heir to Sea and Fire, by day's end.



I seriously considered buying First Law when it was newly published. Can't recall why I didn't. Gotta admit that several well reputed fantasy novels I bought during that period ended up not tickling my fancy. As to Shannara, I read the original series and a number of follow-ups. I found the books uneven in quality, some being engrossing, some blase. It's been a LONG time, but if memory serves I was very favorably impressed with the original series second volume.

At 1204 this afternoon I concluded my fourth reading of Patricia A. McKillip's Heir of Sea and Fire. Gonna start in on the third and final volume, Harpist in the Wind, by day's end.

I finished reading the Elric novels a few days ago. They were a pretty good read, but not great. Moorcock makes a lot of technical mistakes that I just cannot avoid noticing. Head-hopping and telling vs. showing are the two worst - and continual - offenders. He clearly does not know have any idea what to do with a female character, aside from proving that his hero is heterosexual of course, and to serve as damsels in distress.

But all in all they still made for fun reading. There is still a freshness to the character of Elric, who is definitely not cut from the cloth of most fantasy heroes, or even anti-heroes. The way his sword Stormbringer serves as an allegory for addiction was also very sharply in focus for me this time around.

Now I stared Gate of Ivrel, the first book of C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine cycle. So far I am liking it. It is interesting because it is not told from the point of view of the protagonist - Morgaine - but rather from that of her henchman Vanye. That helps to keep Morgaine feeling mysterious, so that we keep guessing about who and what she really is, which is rather nice. So far so good.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Sep 25 2016, 12:01 AM

I've read a good many of Moorcock's various "Eternal Champion" series. To me their strength lies not in the quality of individual titles, which is not always of the highest order, or even individual series, but the overall arching concepts that tie them together. The champion, the Lords of Chaos and Law, the Balance, the multiverse, the Conjunction of the Million Spheres, and so on. For whatever reason I've not been able to drum up enough enthusiasm to re-read the Elric books in years.

I was rather taken with Cherryh's Morgaine cycle when first read ages ago. Not so much during its most recent re-read, though I still enjoyed it.

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Sep 25 2016, 11:30 AM

I like that Moorcock's characters question things such as their role in the universe, whether or not they truly have free will, or are they predestined to walk a path that they cannot change? It helps brings them down to earth, in spite of how exotic and world-shattering the events in their stories are.

Well, I blitzed The Sword of Shannara. It was a pretty solid book, liked how it ended and everything. I only really had two problems with it: The lack of female characters(I think the only one was more a plot point than a character), and the way that the fights got rather tiresome. Apparently Allanon lucked into getting the greatest fighters in the world.

I'm currently most of the way through The Elfstones of Shannara, and have long since given up trying to track it along the tv series. The book is better, for the most part. There are only two things that are really disappointing me at present: Amberle, who's a little bland, and in my opinion totally upstaged by Eretria, which kind of bugs me as an abuse of the whole "chosen one" deal. But what I find really annoying is the way the author refers to certain characters. When not referred to by name, Wil Ohmsford is "The Valeman", Amberle is "The Elven Girl", and Eretria is "The Rover Girl". I don't recall ages being mentioned, so it kind of feels like he's devaluing Amberle and Eretria somewhat by calling them girls. And potentially making it kind of awkward with the way they both seem to really like Wil.

But apart from that, it's a good book, and I'm enjoying it so far.

This post has been edited by Callidus Thorn: Sep 26 2016, 10:35 AM

At 0055 this morning I concluded my fourth reading of Patricia A. McKillip's Harpist in the Wind, third and final volume of The Quest of the Riddlemaster. As of now the series is tied with two fantasy novels by Guy Gavriel Kay for my non-prestigious "Best Re-read of the Year" award. Both authors might be out of the running by year's end, but I suspect it'll be hard to displace 'em.

No idea what I'll read next.