May Readings

May was not a bad month for personal reading. I needed it as I am drowning in medical coding technical manuals and anatomy and such.

I re-read Fred Saberhagen's Broken Lands trilogy. This is a series that I never really hear anyone talk about, even though it's got "Appendix N" cred. I first read these books (in the omnibus Empire of the East form) when I was... 13? 14? Somewhere right around there. Anyway, it was my first rewarding departure from Tolkien - in fact I think I bought the book because it had a blurb about being better than LotR (a tall claim, sure, and pretty much apples & oranges too - very different writers). I read and re-read LotR as a kid more times than I want to admit, so apparently I was ready for something "better".

I'm not going to say that what I got was better than LotR, but it was different, and it was good. It's science-fantasy, weighed a little heavier on the fantasy side, Saberhagen's style far less lyrical. The story had a good impact on me at the time, and helped me to get some perspective, that there was more to the world that Tolkien.The re-read was good - the books stand up in my opinion.

So in addition to The Broken Lands, The Black Mountains, and Changeling Earth, I managed to sneak in 2 more Vance books.

1. Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph - Jack Vance. This is SO Jack Vance, Ridolph might be the archetypical Vance 'hero', a smug detective for hire, all brain, no brawn. Kinda a cosmopolitan Matlock or something...

2. Blue Planet - Jack Vance. Liked it. The culture of the planet seems to have been started by prisoners (from the Gaian Reach I assume), the current castes and professions all derive their names from the titles of criminals and crimes of the far past (they do not seem to be aware of this fact). For example, the Hoodwinkers. Hoodwinke are in charge of communications between settlements - this accomplished by blinking light semaphore at the top of towers.

The thing I am finding in trying to write about Vance is that I have a hard time pinning down the what's & why's - I am content with appreciation.

April readings

Light month on pleasure reading. Getting my ass kicked with class work & real-life in general.

1. Game of Thrones. I read this book back in 2004 or 5, and I think it had a lot to do with reigniting my interest in D&D. So - since I cannot watch the series, I decided to go back and reread the books (also since the new book is due soon). Stands up pretty well so far. It reads like watching TV, and I mean that not in a derogatory sense.

2. Sepulchrave's Story Hour. This page has links to the story threads, and PDF versions of the stories without so much of the reader commentary. Sepulchrave's input over at K&K has always been interesting and stimulating, and while I've never been big on reading campaign journals & such, I was pretty amazed by this one. It is written very well.

Was that it? Really? I'm afraid so. I just don't think that writing about the details of the CPT, ICD-9-CM & HCPCS coding manuals would be of much value here. Trust me on this one. I have continued to acquire more Vance, and look forward to that. Maybe my reading time will increase after June. This month, no Dios for me, :(.

March - Steerpike, Nie the Hever, and Golem XIV

In lieu of gold stars on the fridge, I am awarding myself 3 Dioses, 1 per book read in March.

1. Imaginary Magnitude, Stanislaw Lem - A re-read (it was loaned out for a long time after I first read it), this book is a brilliant and absurd collection of book introductions and sales pitches from the future, building up to a recording of MIT scientists “conversations” with GOLEM XIV, a luminal machine, a tough pill to swallow.

2. Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake - This is the first time I have read it. Wow. I remember that Scott often sung the praises of this and it is really an amazing sustained effort. Paragraphs are scattered though out the book that end finer than anything I’ve ever read. It is an absolutely unique read. Operatic, baroque poetry about the creepy mundane, the doom of responsibility.

3. Maske: Theary, Jack Vance – 1st read, I’ve read enough Vance now to see how almost all of his books are the same. This is not a criticism or a point against in my opinion because I like how all of main characters talk to each other. I also like how there’s hardly ever aliens or monsters in his stories – makes them stand out more when they are present (Dragonmasters, some of Magnus Ridolph… how very few monsters are to be found in the Dying Earth? I can think of a few only, even considering Sandestins seems a stretch - they just as much a-holes as every other character there...)

Sometimes after reading Lem I just can't imagine reading anything else. Golem's like that, the first time I read it I felt shocked. I still don't think I have the right words to express it. The first part of the book is frenetic whimsy, hilarious. I do not want to say anything spoiler-ish about this book, to not color anyone's particular reading of it - it is certainly on the short-list of must-read Lem - so do it!

I took a long time reading Titus Groan. I think I started it in February. Ordered a copy of the second book of the trilogy (! this stuff is dense!), but the book smells horrible. I can't open it and put my nose near it enough to read with out the grossness getting to me. Note to world of book sellers on the Internet at large: if your book stinks like rot, don't sell it to me (or at least tell me in advance. I suppose a stench attendant of Culte des Ghouls might be a selling point).

February reading vs buy my stuff dammit!

In lieu of gold stars on a chart magnetated to the refrigerator, here's a list of the books I read in the month of February. Way less than my banner month of January - probably won't be able to match that pace again for a while (started a class for medical coding certification - so most of my upcoming reading will be dense and somewhat medical... ugh)...

1. Huon of the Horn, Andre Norton
2. Lyonesse, Jack Vance (2nd read)
3. The Green Pearl, Jack Vance (2nd read)
4. Madouc, Jack Vance (2nd read)

The first time I read the Lyonesse trilogy, I was putting my collection together, and so there were long gaps between the readings (a year between Green Pearl and Madouc for example). So this time I read them back to back to back. That helped. I loved them the first time through, and now I love them even more. Cannot help but have some idle brain cycles turning on the idea of writing up the setting for game purposes. Particularly interested in Murgen's Edict...

And I listed a couple more items on the On Ebay page, so right now I've got Verbosh, Rolemaster Creatures & Treasures III, World of Greyhawk boxed set, & Original Bottle City (SE).

I am certain that everyone on the Internet has been wondering what I’ve been doing for the majority of the last few months while not blogging. The simple answer: Reading books. Lots of them.

I’d love to be able to say that I’ve compiled a giant list of ways that these books can be applied to gaming, but I have not. Certainly there were some moments that some things stood out, triggered some "game-thought", but I wasn’t really recording anything at the time.

Here's a list.

November
1. Four Black Revolutionary Plays, LeRoi Jones
2. Giving Good Weight, John McPhee
3. The Jack Vance Treasury
4. The Water of Thought, Fred Saberhagen
5. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
6. The Broken Sword, Poul Anderson

December
1. The Business, Iain Banks
2. Sabbath’s Theater, Phillip Roth
3. Mathematicians in Love, Rudy Rucker
4. Space Opera, Jack Vance
5. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
6. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

January
1. Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces, Tom Clancy, Carl Steiner, Tony Koltz, and Jonathan Marosz
2. Anais: The Erotic Life of Anais Nin, Noel Riley Fitch
3. Space Vikings, H Beam Piper
4. John Addams, David McCullough
5. Best of Leigh Brackett
6. Gloriana, Michael Moorcock
7. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
8. Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen, R E Raspe & others, illustrations by Gustav Dore
9. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe
10. The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami
11. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, also Murakami

Yes I'm particularly happy with the 11 books in one month thing. I've heard a few times recently that the average American reads 2 books a year. What's up with that?

just found Frederik Pohl's blog

Here and read it top to bottom, back and forth. Love it when random wanderings lead to treasures such as this!

Title? OK: delicious avacado

Sometimes you just have to get away from the internet for a while - at least, sometimes I do. Otherwise I begin to get obsessive (in a less-than-optimally-healthy way) - so I've had a blog-sabbatical, and I feel refreshed. Got back to reading real books, and man did I get some good ones - Moorcock's Byzantium Endures, the first book of The Black Company, M. A. R. Barker's Man of Gold, Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee (who is our greatest living author if you ask me - his works, regardless of subject, have never failed me). Currently reading Moondust (talking to the astronauts who walked on the moon) and Under the Black Flag, "the romance and reality of life among the pirates". Next up is one I'm particularly excited about Ardneh's Sword by Fred Saberhagen - apparently a bridge story between Empire of the East and his Swords series... some of my favorite stuff!

Several gamish things have transpired while I've been unblogged. Acquired Rob Kuntz's Bottle City (and it is magnificent!) and the Ready Ref Sheets (finally). Thanks to a tip from Tavis I signed up for Paperbackswap a while back, and it's come through with the Rolemaster Companion II (in fantastic condition) and a late printing of the original cover AD&D Monster Manual (in bad shape, but FREE!). So at this point, I've regained all the 1st edition AD&D books that I want - Huzzah!

Started running a couple of friends through a dungeon a while back, but we haven't had time for any sessions recently. It was going well though, and hopefully we'll be able to restart in the near future. I talked them into testing out a dungeon, the kind of dungeon that is on the other side of a cursed scroll that teleports the reader and party somewhere obtuse. It's been a while since I ran AD&D, so I used the sessions to identify some of my rough spots, started to figure out how I want to handle things (initiative, higher level spells and some powerful magic items, etc... things I never really had the chance to adjudicate BITD).

Now I'm working on a small 'setting' - sort of a mini campaign area. It's been fun building things from scratch - generating a lot of information randomly and then building connections between them. The whole thing started out when I decided to generate some intelligent magic swords. I ended up with a powerful Holy Avenger that spoke several bizarre languages, and so to justify the sword's esoteric linguistic capabilities, designed its history. This established the presence of some powerful evil monsters (namely manticores and ogre magi). Anyway, I've been working on really fleshing out the populations in this area and it has been a lot of fun putting faith in the dice and establishing some story-threads afterwards.

The first Trollszine was published and proved to be a popular download. Felt great to have that come out - I have to admit that the whole Outlaw Press meltdown left me feeling very much like withdrawing from the internet gaming world - it was just such a let down and filled with personal acrimony and, frankly, that's not the kind of thing I need in the main distraction I have from real life (which all too often already has enough negativity to deal with). I got really wrapped up with that, and I think I needed to take a step back - so that's what I did.

If it wasn't for Joesky the Dungeon Brawler and Vaults of Nagoh, I don't know what I'd do!

Take care!
-G

Empire of Amityville Mike

Over on Society of Torch, Pole and Rope, there's an inspirational reading cited which is among my favorites - Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen.

I picked up this book when I was thirteen or fourteen, totally on a whim, and it really snapped me out of my Tolkien fixation (Moorcock was a few years off - probably the final nail in that particular coffin). It is still one of my favorites - one I go back to every few years. I liked the Books of Swords too - in fact one of my earliest attempts to create a game from scratch was based on the Twelve Swords - and even appreciated some of the books of Lost Swords.

Saberhagen's treatment of demons and wizardry here is one of my favorite takes - the messenger that restores the crippled Chup, who came to him with the sound of the wind blowing through dry leaves (if I remember correctly...) - the malicious bastard in the depths of the Blue Temple - I could go on and on. Great stuff. The wizard called Wood, and one of my absolute favorite characters/figures in fiction: the Emperor of the Swords books. What a foil!

I've looked at Saberhagen's web page, but found little elucidation or further exploration of that 'setting'. I am sure that his writing has influenced all of the fantasy gaming that I have run.